This is how most stories end in the hospital. Not with crash carts and sirens and electric shocks to the chest, but with an empty room, a crisp white bed, silence.
Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one of you cracks or stops existing.
Nothing spices up one’s sex life like having a partner.
I used to dream of true love; now I’m open to false, but convincing….
Maybe life involves the pairing of unsuitable people, those who wait and those who keep others waiting, and the key to happiness is finding the one person with whom you share the same internal chronometer.
The only thing more difficult than persuading someone else to start having sex with you is persuading yourself to stop.
Be optimistic. Always put on clean underwear if you’re going on a date.
If you give a man a hammer, he thinks he can solve all problems by pounding. Well, God gave men penises….
The boss is never your friend, even if you’re sleeping with him.
Never make enemies of anyone younger or healthier than you are. They write your history.
Nixon’s offences had been so long in the past, so much part of a different era that he now seemed like some lovable but bigoted uncle you tolerated at Christmas and Thanksgiving.
A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individuals most offended by that claim are the monkeys.
The most dangerous ideas are not those that challenge the status quo. The most dangerous ideas are those so embedded in the status quo, so wrapped in a cloud of inevitability, that we forget they are ideas at all.
Patriotism is being convinced your country is better because you were born in it.
Such is the demographic paradox of a junior physician’s relationship with his patients: I worry about how to extend their lives. This anxiety inevitably shortens my own.
Maybe that is the greatest of wonders: that we can be shaped so much by those we’ve known closely, and equally by those we’ve never known at all – and that we too can change the world long after we’ve left it.
That was the heart of the problem: every choice made sense from some vantage point.
If God wanted teenagers to be abstinent, puberty would begin at twenty.