“All this time, I'd assumed that being a doctor meant performing miracles. Fixing bodies. Saving lives. I had hardly considered the flip side of that coin: that it also meant looking a patient's family in the eye and telling them to say their last goodbyes. That it meant staring down the permanence of death over and over again, until it stopped feeling like something to be prevented at all costs and instead became something to be occasionally embraced.”

“What you see determines how you interpret the world, which in turn influences what you expect of the world and how you expect the story of your life to unfold.”

“I'm not sure why, but when a person expects something to last forever, they don't notice the little things. It's only when the clock is ticking all those little things add up and become bigger.”

“I saw a civilization that could destroy itself before it even reached the nearest star.”

“It must be so easy to judge the decisions of someone else when you sit back and do nothing.”

“Although "making love" may serve as a polite name for an act that has many rude ones, it's misleading. For lovers do not so much make love as they are remade by love--dipped into the fire, melted down, reshaped. If they are devoted to one another, love will transform them, dissolving the shells of their old separate selves and making them anew.”

“Three-letter word that kills you for sure - Ego.”

“He reached for her, his big hand cupping her cheek, his fingers sliding into her hair, scattering hairpins, threatening the quick work she’d done to put it to rights earlier. She didn’t care. Let them fall. Let them rust in the soil to be found two hundred years from now.”