Heather

“Kings" and "Kingdoms" were as thick in Britain as they had been in little Palestine in Joshua's time, when people had to sleep with their knees pulled up because they couldn't stretch out without a passport.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“That’s all very well, but how many family doctors would you need? It simply doesn’t fit into the system of a free universal national health service.” “It’ll fit into a universal national health service, but it won’t fit into a free health service,” said Oreshchenkov, rumbling on and clinging confidently to his point. “But it’s our greatest achievement, the fact that it’s a free service.” “Is this in fact such a great achievement? What does ‘free’ mean? The doctors don’t work for nothing, you know. It only means that they’re paid out of the national budget and the budget is supported by patients. It isn’t free treatment, it’s depersonalized treatment. If a patient kept the money that pays for his treatments, he would have turned the ten roubles he has to spend at the doctor’s over and over in his hands. He could go to the doctor five times over if he really needed to.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward: A Novel

“He’s retired, he’s just turned sixty, you know. And on the actual day of his retirement it turned out he wasn’t a radiologist at heart at all, he didn’t want to spend another day of his life on medicine. He’d always wanted to be a beekeeper, and now bees are the only thing he’ll take an interest in. How do these things happen, do you think? If you’re really a beekeeper, how is it that you waste the best years of your life doing something else?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward: A Novel

“Self-pity is the hens' besetting sin," remarked Mr. Payton. "Foolish fowl. How they came to achieve anything as perfect as the egg I do not know! I cannot fathom.”
― Elizabeth Enright, Gone-Away Lake