Whitney Crouch > Recent Status Updates

"Because I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I'm dying, until I actually die, I am still living."

(p 114) "Our patients' lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn't. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving."

"Those burdens are what are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another's cross, one must sometimes be crushed by the weight."

"When your son is an addict you can think things like 'He is missing and that is a welcome distraction' and not feel like a monster. Can't you?"

"For as tough as the men were in these mountains, the women had always been stone. They were used to loss, accustomed to never having enough. They were fit for the harshness of this world."

This is why I love David Joy.

"It was the last week of September, but the ridgelines were already bare. Down in the valley, the trees were in full color with reds and oranges afire like embers, the acorns falling like raindrops. The nights were starting to frost and within a few weeks the first few breaths of winter would strip the mountains to their gray bones."