Quotes from Atul Gawande

Mr. Drury seldom questioned his daughter's choices, but this sounded to him like a bad idea.

The answer, he believed, is that we all seek a cause beyond ourselves.

After a couple of weeks, she grew only more convinced

WHAT DOES IT take to be good at something in which failure is so easy, so effortless?

The professionals and institutions we turn to should...not confine people's choices, in the name of safety, but to expand them, in the name of living a worthwhile life.

Josiah Royce

there's always something. We want these choices. But that doesn't mean we are eager to make the choices ourselves. Instead, most often, we make no choice at all. We fall back on the default, and the default is: Do Something. Fix Something. Is there any way out of this? There

Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. It gave people—the young and the old—a way of life with more liberty and control, including the liberty to be less beholden to other generations. The veneration of elders may be gone, but not because it has been replaced by veneration of youth. It's been replaced by veneration of the Independent self.

lives. As pervasive as medicine has become in modern life, it remains mostly hidden and often misunderstood.

Mostly, the experiments did more harm than good.

People may hate being embarrassed and strive not to show it when they are, but embarrassment serves an important good. For, unlike sadness or anger or even love, it is fundamentally a moral emotion

help people in a state of dependence sustain the value of existence.

The pressure remains all in one direction, toward doing more, because the only mistake clinicians seem to fear is doing too little. Most have no appreciation that equally terrible mistakes are possible in the other direction—that doing too much could be no less devastating to a person's life.

As with many doctors, his job was his identity.

The side effects are not life-threatening, but they are not trivial. The

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

The successful M & M presentation inevitably involves a certain elision of detail and a lot of passive verbs.

I was willing to be rejected...You have to be willing to be rejected. It was a trait that let him persist until he got what he wanted and avoid whatever he didn't want.

Medicine and public health have transformed the trajectory of our lives. For all but our most recent history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn't matter whether you were five or fifty. Every day was a roll of the dice.

The message, however, was not lost on anyone.

He found the bullets for the gun and contemplated suicide.

For all these reasons, the operation is at best a last resort

I would have gone through with it even if they told me there was a fifty percent chance of death.

When things go wrong, the attending is expected to take full responsibility. It