“The most difficult thing is when you can’t do anything. When you just have to wait.”

“You can’t buy time, Nick. Ever. It’s the only thing in life you can’t get most of, and it’s the one thing that will mercilessly tear you up when it’s gone. It takes no pity on no soul and no heart.”

“When you think of the silly things people have said to you which have stopped you from saying the same silly things, you simply can’t do justice to your gratitude.”

“Now all you can do is wait. It must be hard for you, but there is a right time for everything. Like the ebb and flow of tides. No one can do anything to change them. When it is time to wait, you must wait.”

“I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t train children to wait to be told what to do; I can’t train people to drop what they are doing when a bell sounds; I can’t persuade children to feel some justice in their class placement when there isn’t any, and I can’t persuade children to believe teachers have valuable secrets they can acquire by becoming our disciples. That isn’t true.”

“I have a philosophy, you do the best you can, and the things you can’t do anything about, don’t give any thought to them. … I feel I have to make a contribution. When I was doing surgery, I made it by operating. Now I try to make it by speaking about preventive medicine.”

“Waiting and hoping is a hard thing to do when you've already been waiting and hoping for almost as long as you can bear it.”

“Then I thought, boy, isn't that just typical? You wait and wait and wait for something, and then when it happens, you feel sad.”

“My mother taught me the most important principles, to be determined in life, to be disciplined, to be able to understand that there are some things that you can’t do and other things you have to do, that you always have to be surrounded by love, that you have to be understanding.”

“But I do believe that's when you do your soul-searching. I think when you have these trials that life gives you, it is an opportunity to find out who you are. Not just who you are when everything's great, but who are you when every thing is taken away from you and you have nothing.”