Quotes on Stanford

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

You're already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next.

My friends and I started that motto early in high school - that attitude, that mentality - from way back then: Want to go to Stanford? Why not? Want to play in the NBA? Why not?

The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle.

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.

I had spent so much time studying literature at Stanford and the history of medicine at Cambridge in an attempt to better understand the particularities of death, only to come away feeling like they were still unknowable to me.

We like to think there is this core of human nature – that good people can't do bad things, and that good people will dominate over bad situations. Infact, when we look at the Stanford prison studies, that we put good people in an evil place, and we saw who won. Well, the sad message in this, is in this case is the evil place won over the good people.

You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.