When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.

Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be. I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around, but...

You are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can can play...

Don’t leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can play the ‘Gloria’?

You can’t show up at the bedside and then turn on your skills. You have to keep your game sharp all the time.

When you win, you often lose, that’s just a fact. There’s no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart…

I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient...

Medicine, you see, is my first love; whether I write fiction or nonfiction, and even when it has nothing to do with medicine, it’s still about medicine. After all, what is medicine but life plus?...

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

I’m the first to admit that the resolution of a hand feeling the belly doesn’t compare with the resolution of a CAT scan scanning the belly, but only my hand can say that it hurts...

Life is full of signs. The trick is to know how to read them. Ghosh called this heuristics, a method for solving a problem for which no formula exists.

To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.

In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.

Being the first born gives you great patience.

As a young physician in the mid-’80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them....

My writing flows out of my doctorhood. They are not separate things. They are one. I think the foremost connection between being a doctor and being a writer is the great privilege of having an...

…a world where a sparrow’s fate and that of a man can be decided in the blink of a cat’s eye, such is the true measure of time.

My desire to be a physician had a lot to do with that sense of medicine as a ministry of healing, not just a science. And not even just a science and an art, but...

Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life . . . was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of...

We stopped you from going, didn’t we? Me and Shiva. Our birth?”Don’t be silly. Can you imagine me giving up this?” he said sweeping his hand to indicate family, Missing, the home he’d made out...

So I consider myself a dog person. Kind of. Had dogs when I was a kid, but my parents would never have dreamed of having them in the house.

Children were the foot wedged in the closing door, the glimmer of hope that in reincarnation there would be some house to go to, even if one came back as a dog, or a mouse,...

I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don’t postpone your dreams.

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...

… telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology.

The incredible cinematography makes ‘A Walk to Beautiful’ almost like a poem; there is a tenderness on display that seems to emanate from the camera. There is also great sensitivity to the women whose stories...

it was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.” p 380

I don’t think you can be a physician and not see yourself reflected in your patient’s illness. How would I deal with the kind of news I’d given Mr. Walters?

Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.

A man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world…

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...

When I use the word ‘healing,’ by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we’re very good at handling, but there’s always a sense of the violation. ‘Why me?’ ‘Why is...

Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”….I met his gaze and I did not blink. “Words of comfort,” I said to my father.

There are moments as a teacher when I’m conscious that I’m trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago. It’s an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not...

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

I’m a great believer in geography being destiny.

I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety...

The master-word is Work, a little one, as I have said, but fraught with momentous sequences if you can but write it on the tablets of your hearts, and bind it upon your foreheads.

My deceased patients have taught me over the years to believe in the glass half full, to make good use of the time we have, to be generous – that was their lesson for the...

I think legislation needs to put an end to doctors profiting on businesses to which they can funnel patients – that is business, not medicine. If you try to call it medicine, then it is...

My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I have the deepest respect, says, “The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do.” Knowing when not to operate, knowing when...

I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and but for their services, I’m not sure how exactly we...

I welcomed my slavish existence as a surgical resident, the never-ending work, the cries that kept me in the present, the immersion in blood, pus, and tears — the fluids in which one dissolved all...

You live it forward, but understand it backward.

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

Modern society has evolved to the point where we counter the old-fashioned fatalism surrounding the word ‘cancer’ by embracing the idea of the Uber-mind – that our will possesses nearly supernatural powers.

Everyone needed an obsession.

For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information. It seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a...

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

No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.