Julia > Recent Status Updates

I marveled at his gift for distancing himself from what was going on by dancing, or by drawing the motorcycle, or playing with prime numbers. He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him; I was envious.

Of course, I wasn't really unhappy or lonely, but in the monsoon season it seemed necessary to think of myself that way. The unfairness of the Admiralty in London, the irony of Hom-blower's seasickness, the tragedy of his returning from a long voyage to find his children mortally ill with smallpox... I had my equivalents, trivial as they were, for all these perils.

„The best investment I‘ve ever made,“ Hema said a few days later, smacking her lips like a schoolgirl. „Corn makes all the difference.“
„Hardly a controlled experiment, given the bias you introduced for the corn,“ Ghosh said

I take off from standing and race on down the lane. My heart does not so much feel that it is in my chest as in my hands, and that I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside me.

Now that I know I must go home, I almost want to go, to get it over with

“Do you know what the women have a gift for?” - “What?” - “Eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what’s coming before a man even gets a sniff of it”

“You don’t ever have to say anything. … many’s the man lost much just because he misses a perfect opportunity to say nothing”

Walking down the road, there’s a taste of something darker on the air, of something that might fall and blow and change things

Kinsella’s eyes are not quite still in his head. It’s as though there’s a big peace of trouble stretching itself out in the back of his mind

And so the dass pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end: to wake in a wet bed, to make some blander, some big gaffe, to break something, but each day follows on much like the one before.

Whatever love of art I felt shriveled in comparison to the bewildering feeling that I was woefully uninformed and thus doing it wrong.

My first trip to galleries in Chelsea left me with the distinct impression I’d wandered into a private party by mistake. Pretension hung in the air like an unacknowledged fart, and at each show, I felt two tattoos and a master’s degree short of fitting in

I reckon we always meet the people we are supposed to meet

excised a part of himself as blithely as if he were cutting for stone on the body of another

She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life. Now, it semed she would only have a few seconds, and in that realization came her epiphany. As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled. She was ashamed that such a simple insight should have eluded her all these years. Make something beautiful of your life.

When, as a student at Madras Medical College, Hema had found herself admiring her professor of therapeutics …, when she found herself wishing to be his understudy and found him encouraging, she deliberately chose another path. She was loath to give anyone that kind of power. She chose obstetrics and gynecology instead of his field, internal medicine.

She felt neither the obligation to join the herd nor the urge to try to stand out from it.

“The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do”

2/2 "Why must I do what is hardest?" "Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can play the 'Gloria?"

1/2 I chose the specialty of surgery because of Matron, that steady presence during my boyhood and adolescence. "What is the hardest thing you can possibly do?" she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of the first half of my life. I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap between ambition and expediency.

2/2 (cont) She stays there listening to the burbling mantra, the chant that never ceases, repeating its message that all is one. What she thought was her life is all _maya_, all illusion, but it is one shared illusion. And what else can she do but go on

This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone

Elsie was, he thought, without blemishes on the outside. Flaw-less. Her scars, her burns, and her contractures were all on the inside, invisible... unless one gazed into her eyes: then it was like looking into a still pond and gradually making out the sunken car with its trapped occupants at the bottom. You're not alone, he wanted to say. Elsie met his gaze and didn't look away.

She feels a fist unclench in her chest - it’s been there ever since Digby showed up at Triple Yem, a lifetime ago.

Every family has secrets, but not all secrets are meant to deceive. What defines a family is not blood, molay, but the secrets they share.

4/4 Meanwhile, having heard the call to battle, the rogue mercenaries (neutrophils), armed to the teeth, stand ready.
At the first scent of spilled blood-any blood, from friend or foe— these mercenaries will go on a killing frenzy ...

3/4 The same veterans of prior typhoid campaigns also assemble a biological-warfare platoon (B lymphocytes) who hastily manufacture a one-of-a-kind boiling oil (antibodies) to pour over the castle wall; it will melt the typhoid intruders' shields, while not harming others.

2/3 The few aging veterans of previous battles with typhoid (memory T-lymphocytes) are roused from their beds, summoned to hastily teach untested conscripts the specific typhoid-grappling skills needed, and then to arm them with custom lances designed solely to latch onto and pierce the typhoid shield—in essence, the veterans clone their younger selves.

She had launched right into inflammation, the body's first response to any threat, the common denominator of all disease. In minutes she had drawn them into the thick of a battle: the invaders (typhoid bacteria) are spotted by the hilltop sentries (macrophages), who send signals back to the castle (the bone marrow and lymph nodes). 1/3

I used to be frightened of the sick. Now, we’re all so focused on disease that sometimes the person suffering barely registers … I think all doctors have the illusion that we have some sort of bargain with God. We care for the sick and are spared in return.