“I had a polynomial once. My doctor removed it.”

“Once, I had to drive Oliver to soccer, was ten minutes late, and learned that there had apparently been a misprint in the Bible on the Ten Commandments thing: Thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not be late to soccer. My father was so pissed, I practically had to get the lightning bolt surgically removed from my back.”

“I told a doctor once, "Doc, if you want to know what's inside of me, put down the x-ray and pick up my novel!”

“I had a feeling that Ben Lancaster had just tattooed himself onto my soul and the thing about tattoos? They were painful to remove.”

“After I heard that I had had a heart attack, how I lived in my body changed, and my doctor should have found a way to let me know he recognized that.”

“There had always been a conflict in me between mystery and meaning. I had pursued tha latter, worshipped the latter as a doctor. As a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw that the attempt to scientize reality, to name it and categorize it and vivisect it out of existence, was like trying to remove the air from the atmosphere. In the creating of the vacuum it was the experimenter who died, because he was inside the vacuum.”