302 Quotes by Atul Gawande

We are a species that evolved to survive starvation, not resist abundance.

The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness.

As fewer of us are struck dead out of the blue, most of us will spend significant periods of our lives too reduced and debilitated to live independently.

A failure often does not have to be a failure at all. However, you have to be ready for it-will you admit when things go wrong? Will you take steps to set them right?-because the difference between triumph and defeat, you’ll find, isn’t about willingness to take risks. It’s about mastery of rescue.

Arriving at an acceptance of one’s mortality is a process, not an epiphany.

It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death – losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life.

To become a doctor, you spend so much time in the tunnels of preparation – head down, trying not to screw up, just going from one day to the next – that it is a shock to find yourself at the other end, with someone shaking your hand and offering you a job. But the day comes.

Courage, Laches responds, “is a certain endurance of the soul.

Their attitude seemed to result from incomprehension rather than cruelty, but as Tolstoy would have said, what’s the difference in the end?