“To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.”

“So Medicare decided to pay hospitals like ours for internship andresidency training programs, get it? It’s a win-win, as they say—the hospitalgets patients cared for by interns and residents around the clock,people like us who live on site, and whose stipend is a bloody fraction of what the hospital would pay full-time physicians. And Medicare delivers health care to the poor.”

“You see, young Dr. Marion, that's what makes us human. We always want more.”

“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.”

“Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration of the superorganism. It's a sound the new immigrant hears but not for long. By the time I learned to say "6-inch Number 7 on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce," the sound, too, was gone. It became part of the what the mind would label silence. You were subsumed into the superorganism.”

“When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.""God will judge us by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”

“What neither the reader nor Stone would accept was that his self-amputation was as much and act of conceit as it was an act of heroism" p 61”