We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

My own view is that one cannot be religious in general any more than one can speak language in general; at any given moment one speaks French or English or Swahili or Japanese, but not 'language.

The fact that illness is associated with the poor --who are, from the perspective of the privileged, aliens in one's midst --reinforces the association of illness with the foreign with an exotic, often primitive place.