Reb

“Fresh sorrows reactivate old ones. We go to the same well to grieve, and it's fuller every time.”
― Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Way the Crow Flies

“Why does she do this? Rankle against her father, resent him for not caring, for never being who she wants him to be — and then when he does do something kind and fatherly, something that another, better father would do for another, better daughter, her happiness is too bountiful to bear, the pleasure intolerable. She must thrust it away from her, must rush through the moment.”
― Kirstin Valdez Quade, The Five Wounds

“It’s a moment every clinician has inhabited and, all too often, pulled back from—a threshold we fear crossing. We imagine ourselves, [...], and recognize a double bind, a new doctor’s dilemma: if we ask about [a patient's interest/personal information], we fall hopelessly behind in administrative tasks and feel more burned out. If we don’t ask about [it], we avoid the kind of intimacy that not only helps the patient, but also nourishes us and keeps us from feeling burned out.”
― Suzanne Koven, Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life

“I wonder whether, just as we take recertification exams every few years, we might be required, at intervals, to rewrite our medical school admissions essays, to articulate at each stage of our careers just what sort of doctors we aspire to be. Origin myths are meant to be retold and reinterpreted again and again.”
― Suzanne Koven, Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life