I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field—internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding...
Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.And so I became a surgeon.
The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not." -Cutting for Stone
Surely you couldn't be a good doctor and a terrible human being---surely the laws of man, if not God, didn't allow it.
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 tr...
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 Shiva, . . . to rock a...
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'?
The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
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.
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 the 'Gl...
To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.
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.
No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail...
The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
...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 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 am in over...
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.
When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
... telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology.
