The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep...

Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school – not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.

We’re now able to show that the words of comfort trigger biological reactions which are the very things that you want, and you can use drugs to get there, or you can use words of...

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it – the process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialized language, can ironically...

There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’ I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle...

That’s the funny thing about America–the blessed thing. As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others. I’ve had my share of angels.

Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.

Yesterday misspent can’t be recall’dVanity makes beauty contemptibleWisdom is more valuable than riches.

The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It’s like a cancer that’s metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is...

I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient whose care I am taking over is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it’s only at...

It was a tale well known to children all over Africa: Abu Kassem, a miserly Baghdad merchant, had held on to his battered, much repaired pair of slippers even though they were objects of derision....

I’ve never bought this idea of taking a therapeutic distance. If I see a student or house staff cry, I take great faith in that. That’s a great person; they’re going to be a great...

When he recalls it in later years, he will wonder if he is distorting it, embellishing it, because each time he consciously recalls her, that forms a new memory, a new imprint to be stacked...

Do they listen?”He held up a finger. “Every year one does,” he said, ginning, “But that one makes it worthwhile. Even Jesus only did twelve. I try to get one a year.

The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.

God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by–by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.

Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage,...

I write by stealing time. The hours in the day have never felt as if they belonged to me. The greatest number has belonged to my day job as a physician and professor of medicine...

Geography is destiny.

My advice for writers is to get a good day job. It takes the pressure off writing if you have a job that pays the bills.

Years later, when Idi Amin said and did outrageous things, I understood that his motivation was to rattle the good people of Greenwich mean time, have them raise their heads from their tea and scones,...

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...

When you have a natural genetic tan developed over centuries and many generations, the idea of soaking up rays by the pool has never made sense.

God will judge us by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.

I joke, but only half joke, that if you show up in an American hospital missing a finger, no one will believe you until they get a CAT scan, MRI and orthopedic consult.

I’m a proud American – becoming a citizen in 1988 was one of the most profoundly moving occasions in my life; I’m a former Texan and a recent Californian.

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.