Quotes from book

Cutting for Stone

“Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.”

“Make something beautiful of your life.”

“Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted”

“Life is like that. You live it forward but understand it backward.”

“Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?"…. I met his gaze and I did not blink. "Words of comfort," I said to my father.”

“We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”

“Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”

“He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.”

“She died chasing greatness and never saw it each time it was in her hand, so she kept seeking it elsewhere, but never understood the work required to get it or to keep it.”

“We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.”

“When you win, you often lose, that's just a fact. There's no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart…”

“Geography is destiny.”

“No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.”

“The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.”

“There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed”

“A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.”

“God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by--by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”

“Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals”

“… guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.”