“My mother died of colon cancer one week after my eleventh birthday, and that fact has shaped my life. All that I have become and much that I have not become, I trace directly or indirectly to her d...”

“Moths and flames, mankind and death--there is little difference.”

“I never had a conscious fear of death, but I did have a conscious fear of sickness. By the time I completed medical school, that fear was gone.”

“Not death but disease is the real enemy; disease, the malign force that requires confrontation. Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost.”

“Cancer cells are fixed at an age where they are still too young to have learned the rules of the society in which they live. As with so many immature individuals of all living kinds, everything the...”

“Even putting aside the Judeo-Christian morality upon which the Constitution and our nation's culture are based, the notion of forced euthanasia would contradict the long-held body of medical ethics...”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of wi...”

“My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains....”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”

“The disease of the soul is both more common and more deadly than the disease of the body. Just as medicine is the art devoted to healing the body, so philosophy is the art devoted to healing the so...”

“Popular medicine and popular morality belong together and ought not to be evaluated so differently as they still are: both are the most dangerous pseudo-sciences.”

“One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.”