Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

Like countless first-year medical students, immersed in the symptoms of one disease after another, I am alert to the tingles and pangs, the throbs and quivers of my mortal body, each one of which is potentially a sign of the end.

Memory changes as a person matures.

Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.

After years of having immersed myself in science, I do think that if you master several different ways of thinking, it makes your own thought processes more agile.

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.