And Finally I put down the last and the best advice I knew, on growing older. 'Stand up straight and try not to get fat.

When you hold a child to your breast to nurse, the curve of the little head echoes exactly the curve of the breast it suckles, as though this new person truly mirrors the flesh from which it sprang.

An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; and American thinks a hundred years is a long time

If ye loved him, he must ha' been a good man.' 'Yes, he...was.' 'Then I shall do my best to honor his spirit by serving his wife.

It was one of those strange moments that came to him rarely, but never left. A moment that stamped itself on heart and brain, instantly recallable in every detail, for all of his life. There was no telling what made these moments different from any other, though he knew them when they came. He had seen sights more gruesome and more beautiful by far, and been left with no more than a fleeting muddle of their memory. But these-- the still moments, as he called them to himself-- they came with no warning, to print a random image of the most common things inside his brain, indelible.

Healing comes from the healed; not from the physician.

One dictum I had learned on the battlefields of France in a far distant war: You cannot save the world, but you might save the man in front of you, if you work fast enough.