A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.

I was angry with myself because I still loved her, or at least I loved that dream of our togetherness. My feelings were unreasonable, irrational, and I couldn't change them. That hurt.

We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.

Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?"... "Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223"... "And pray, why would this number interest us?" "It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, 'One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes'.

By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.

We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.