Maureen

“Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it a friendship, I said to myself.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Openness to human relationality does not mean revealing grand truths from the apse; it means meeting patients where they are, in the narthex or nave, and bringing them as far as you can.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“With the poet, it is gold and silver, but with the philosopher it is iron and corn, which have civilized men, and ruined mankind.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation Of The Inequality Among Mankind

“I had started in this career, in part, to pursue death: to grasp it, uncloak it, and see eye-to-eye, unblinking. Neurosurgery attracted me as much for its intertwining of brain and consciousness as for its intertwining of life and death. I had thought that a life spent in the space between the two would grant me not merely a stage for compassionate action but an elevation of my own being: getting as far away from petty materialism, from self- important trivia, getting right there, to the heart of the matter, to truly life and death decisions and struggles... surely a kind of transcendence would be found there?”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air