Alex > Alex's Quotes

“This is a memoir of (my) body because, more often than not, stories of bodies like mine are ignored or dismissed or derided. People see bodies like mine and make their assumptions. They think they know the why of my body. They do not.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“Listening can continue even when you are no longer in the presence of the speaker as you reflect on what the person said and gain added insight. This is not to recommend obsessive rumination or picking apart conversations, which psychiatrist Zerbe said usually has more to do with insecurity than honest reflection. You know you’re doing this when you are spinning your wheels going over and over how you feel about something someone said instead of considering the feelings that drove the other person to say it.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“Patients become objects of fear as well as of sympathy. It is much easier to feel compassion for other people if you are not responsible for what happens to them”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

“Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to pray – a place of bitterness and regret, where he must look for an explanation for his failures.’ René Leriche, La philosophie de la chirurgie, 1951”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

“People are moved when their interactions with you always leave them a little better.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age

“One must drop all presuppositions and dogmas and rules - for there only lead to stalemate or disaster; one must cease to regard all patients as replicas, and honor each one with individual reactions and propensities; and, in this way, with the patient as one's equal, one's co-explorer, not one's puppet, one may find therapeutic ways which are better than other ways, tactics which can be modified as occasion requires.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“The most valuable lesson I’ve learned as a journalist is that everybody is interesting if you ask the right questions. If someone is dull or uninteresting, it’s on you.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“While people often say, “I can’t talk right now,” what they really mean is “I can’t listen right now.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“people in long-term relationships tend to lose their curiosity for each other. Not necessarily in an unkind way; they just become convinced they know each other better than they do. They don’t listen because they think they already know what the other person will say.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know. It’s what we all crave; to be understood as a person with thoughts, emotions, and intentions that are unique and valuable and deserving of attention.
Listening is not about teaching, shaping, critiquing, appraising, or showing how it should be done (“Here, let me show you.” “Don’t be shy.” “That’s awesome!” “Smile for Daddy.”). Listening is about the experience of being experienced. It’s when someone takes an interest in who you are and what you are doing. The lack of being known and accepted in this way leads to feelings of inadequacy and emptiness. What makes us feel most lonely and isolated in life is less often the result of a devastating traumatic event than the accumulation of occasions when nothing happened but something profitably could have. It’s the missed opportunity to connect when you weren’t listening or someone wasn’t really listening to you.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“Life without hope is hopelessly difficult but at the end hope can so easily make fools of us all.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery - as seen on 'life-changing' BBC documentary Confessions of a Brain Surgeon

“Surgeons must always tell the truth but rarely, if ever, deprive patients of all hope. It can be very difficult to find the balance between optimism and realism.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

“But death is not always a bad outcome, you know, and a quick death can be better than a slow one.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

“It was miserable work, with little reward, and I learned much about the limitations of human kindness, and in particular my own.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm Stories of Life Death and Brain Surgery / Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery / Dear Life A Doctors Story of Love and Loss / Quick Reads This Is Going To Hurt

“Hope is beyond price and the pharmaceutical companies, which are run by businessmen not altruists, price their products accordingly.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

“Indeed, one of the most gratifying things you can say to another person is: "I've been thinking about what you said.”
― Kate Murphy, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

“how we seek to spend our time may depend on how much time we perceive ourselves to have.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“She's the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother is so important to science, why can't we get health insurance?”
― Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“What does it say about our culture that the desire for weight loss is considered a default feature of womanhood?”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“It is a powerful lie to equate thinness with self-worth.”
― Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

“Novels and stories give people the chance to experience countless lives.”
― Jamil Zaki, The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Don’t be flattered that he misses you. He should miss you. You are deeply missable. However, he’s still the same person who just broke up with you. Remember, the only reason he can miss you is because he’s choosing, every day, not to be with you.”
― Greg Behrendt, He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys

“If you want guys to take you seriously, you must get them to pick up the phone and call you.”
― Bruce Bryans, Never Chase Men Again: 38 Dating Secrets to Get the Guy, Keep Him Interested, and Prevent Dead-End Relationships

“The only reason he can miss you is because he’s choosing, every day, not to be with you.”
― Greg Behrendt, He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys

“It is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities