“And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.”

“Submission is the art of compensating for your weakness by playing to each other's strengths.”

“Tell me how you are." "I'm fine, Mother." "No one is fine. Fine is a placeholder.”

“When we play it safe, we sabotage our chance to make our mark in a memorable, authentic way. Health care organizations confront pressures to provide more responsive, personal care with cost efficiency, striving to provide the industry’s “patient-centered care” goal. However, when every hospital system and specialty clinic cautiously claims to provide “patient-centered care”— because all of their competitors claim to provide “patient-centered care”—their claim becomes so safe that they disappear into the din of their competitors’ identical claims.”

“I don’t mean to ruin the ending for you, sweet child, but life is one long headwind. To make any kind of impact requires self-will bordering on madness. The world will be hostile, it will be suspicious of your intent, it will misinterpret you, it will inject you with doubt, it will flatter you into self-sabotage. My God, I’m making it sound so glamorous and personal! What the world is, more than anything? It’s indifferent.” “Say amen to that,” Spencer said. “But you have a vision. You put a frame around it. You sign your name anyway. That’s the risk. That’s the leap. That’s the madness: thinking anyone’s going to care.”

“They have access to your brain, they have access to your body. They hack your brain, they hack your body to make you think certain things, to make you do certain things. To extract thoughts. Invisibly. But nothing is reliable.”

“Being content with less, creates space in the heart for more love.”

“Books become my refuge. Reading keeps me hopeful. I fall in love with small poems, the shorter the better- haiku from Japan, and tiny rhymes by Emily Dickinson.”