Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to … - Atul Gawande

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This world is bullshit. And you shouldn't model your life — wait a second — you shouldn't model your life about what you think that we think is cool and what we're wearing and what we're saying and everything. Go with yourself. Go with yourself.

Atul Gawande

Writing lets you step back and think through a problem. Even the angriest rant forces the writer to achieve a degree of thoughtfulness.

Angriest, Degrees, Forces, Problem, Thinking, Writing

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Don’t let yourself be. Find something new to try, something to change. Count how often it succeeds and how often it doesn’t. Write about it. Ask a patient or a colleague what they think about it. See if you can keep the conversation going.

Ask, Conversation, See, Thinking, Trying, Writing

Go back to the '30s, '40s, '50s, and it was the discovery of heroic interventions, the ability to cure people with penicillin or do an operation to stop disease that was what saved the day. Primary care physicians couldn't do all that much that really demonstrated a difference. The people who control and work with you to control your blood pressure, they're not rewarded for doing that or to be innovative about doing that. So, the result is half of Americans have uncontrolled high blood pressure, despite seeing clinicians.

Care, Disease, Heroic, People, Physicians, Stop

In many ways, the effort to study philosophy was my rebellion away from medicine. I'm the son of two Indian immigrant physicians, so the natural path for me would have been to become a doctor. I ended up doing the master's degree at Oxford in politics, philosophy, and economics while already having a seat in medical school. I was keeping that as my escape hatch. But my hope was that I might become a philosopher or something else entirely.

Already, Having, Philosophy, Politics, School, Son

You know, 97 percent of the time, if you come into a hospital, everything goes well. But three percent of the time, we have major complications.

Complication, Know, Percent, Three, Wells

After readinf some essay on the nature of human fallibility, I was very aware that we are the recipients of a huge amount of discovery over the last century. Medicine exemplifies this. And that has transitioned us from a world in which people's lives were mostly governed by ignorance to one that's constrained by ineptitude. A century ago, we didn't know, for instance, what diseases afflicted us, what their nature really was, or what to do about them. And that has changed.

Changed, Ignorance, Nature, World

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Jonathan Safran Foer

And nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent. Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood — which is a good shame — is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers.

Blush, Children, Hypocrisy, Inspires, Parent, Say

David Lodge

Paraphrase, in the sense of summary, is as indispensable to the novel-critic as close analysis is to the critic of lyric poetry. The natural deduction is that novels are paraphrasable whereas poems are not. But this is a false deduction because close analysis is itself a disguised form of paraphrase.

Analysis, Critic, Literature, Lyric, Lyric Poetry, Paraphrase

Rachel Naomi Remen

In this culture the soul and the heart too often go homeless. Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time. And in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually you may be able to hear, in everyone and beyond everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.

Culture, Heart, People, Silence, Soul

Jhumpa Lahiri

The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold.

Chemical, Chemical Reactions, Cold, Compelling, Narrative

Fiona Apple

Bullshit, Cool, Life, Saying, Thinking, Waiting