"...Ellen couldn't have come into gentler company. There was no avid curiosity, no malicious speculation, no self-congratulation that such a thing couldn't happen to them, as there might have been among younger women. These women were old, time had softened them, they had learnt something from loss, helplessness, loneliness; they knew that almost anything can happen to anybody. They were kinder than when they were young."

"Long-continued disability makes some people saintly, some self-pitying, some bitter. It has only clarified Sally and made her more herself."

"It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents' love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness."

"Our dream of life will end as dreams do end, abruptly and completely, when the sun rises, when light comes. And we will think, All that fear and all that grief were about nothing. But that cannot be true. I can't believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life."

"Today I realized I am not in a bad mood. I am something else. I am someone else. This happens to me as it happens to everyone. You are not you for months at a time. When you become you again, you can actually greet yourself. You can welcome yourself back."

"I'd recently lost my innocence as well. I was an illness iconoclast until I wasn't. At the age of forty-four, after decades of health so entrenched it was mistaken for chronic, I, like her, became sick. The word 'sick,' however, doesn't accurately describe what befell me. I had pain. I had pain all the time.... I felt as though I was being initiated into a strange endurance sport, one without a clock or any means to keep score and end the match."

"I'm grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally."

Next on my list...!

"...[T]he physician's duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence."