“Dear Lord...patch this work. Quilt us together, feather-stitching piece by piece our tag-ends of living, our individual scraps of love”

“Even doctors — or perhaps especially doctors — need to be touched by something personally to understand the suffering of others. We’ve been taught about the enormous power over life and death that is invested in us; we can be deluded into thinking we are almighty. Almost instinctively we view death, incurable disease and disability as challenging our power. We forget that this is all part of life. I guess that we have to defend ourselves against the human suffering that confronts us every day, otherwise we’d quickly go under. Medical jargon helps keep us remote, yet seeing colleagues suffer is hard. If we think too much, we realise that we – and our loved ones – are just as vulnerable as the rest of humanity.”

“Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.”

“Some habits are internal, more than external. They live in our thought processes, our attitudes and our outlook. And if these mental habits go unchecked, it can cause us to live in a state of mental compression because our habits are living our lives for us. But the truth is, mental health is the beginning of all habitual health problems. If a habit, such as envy, lust, comparison, discontent, takes root in your mind, that mental habit is eventually going to be given the reins to the rest of your health if not taken care of.”

“Each of us may think we know exactly what we need to make us happy, what will be good for us, what will ensure we have our happy ending, but life rarely works out in the way we expect, and our happy ending may have all sorts of unexpected twists and turns, be shaped in all sorts of unexpected ways”

“Don't you see? The things we once loved do not change, only our belief in them... You are left with the only things that any of us have in the end. The things we keep inside of ourselves, that grow out of us, that tell us who we are.”

“GPs are almost the only doctors these days who understand all problems, can see the whole person…spend time with the dying…see things through to the end.”