“Love on the decline is hard to tell from love on the rise.” [From 'The Lady from Lucknow']”

“Humor's the hardest thing to translate.”

“It's making life important, making a single life important, rather than having a prescription for the global ills which afflict us.”

“But the story of leukemia--the story of cancer--isn't the story of doctors who struggle and survive, moving from institution to another. It is the story of patients who struggle and survive, moving from on embankment of illness to another. Resilience, inventiveness, and survivorship--qualities often ascribed to great physicians--are reflected qualities, emanating first from those who struggle with illness and only then mirrored by those who treat them. If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients.”

“The (cancer) cells, technically speaking, are immortals. The woman from whose body they were once taken has been dead for thirty years”

“How can one capture genes that behave like ghosts," Weinberg wrote, "influencing cells from behind some dark curtain?”

“In 2005, a man diagnosed with multiple myeloma asked me if he would be alive to watch his daughter graduate from high school in a few months. In 2009, bound to a wheelchair, he watched his daughter graduate from college. The wheelchair had nothing to do with his cancer. The man had fallen down while coaching his youngest son's baseball team.”