I'm a great believer in geography being destiny..

Another day in paradise' was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understand what that meant: the uneventful da….

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 bl….

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caugh….

He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live..

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 feel….

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 th….

Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny..

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 f….

My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize the no mone….

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

I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it's only at….

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 y….

I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the d….

Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted.

What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?.

What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?.

Being the first born gives you great patience..

Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?.

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

We're losing a ritual. We're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationshi….