In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we 'battle' cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation. If we are fortunate, we 'beat' the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having 'succumbed after a long battle.'

The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.

Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It's a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you owe them nothing.

The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.

If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.

Patients know in a heartbeat if they're getting a clumsy exam.