What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?

Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.

Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.

You may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

You can't make a recipe for something as complicated as surgery. Instead, you can make a recipe for how to have a team that's prepared for the unexpected.

Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.

Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength.

Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.

Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you.

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.

On the shining yards of heavenSee a wider dawn unfurled. . . . The eternal slaves of beautyAre the masters of the world.

Being snappy is a symptom of an argument we forgot to have some way back.

When you're a kid, somebody's mid-forties, you think they're an old man. Then you grow up and it's like, I was a kid.

It's kind of funny to read the work of ex-Marines and soldiers because what they said to me as a reporter was only a fraction of what they were thinking and feeling and saying to one another.

It is love that believes the resurrection.

The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale. Military and economic power is necessarily wielded by people.

Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.

To define is to kill. To suggest is to create.

Illumination by the Spirit is the endless end of every virtue.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.