30 Quotes by Samuel Shem

You know what they say: It’s better to have dyspareuned than never to have pareuned at all.

This might have been the only thing that could have awakened you. Your whole life has been a growing from the outside, mastering the challenges that others have set for you. Now, finally, you might just be growing from inside yourself. It can be a whole new world, Roy, I know it. A whole new life.” Eyes wet with tears, she said, “I’m going to love you even more, Roy, because I’ve been waiting a long time for you to begin.

It’s our job to tell them that imperfect health is and always has been perfect health, and that most of the things that go wrong with their bodies we can’t do much about. So maybe we do make diagnoses; big deal. We hardly ever cure.

This wine makes me feel like I’m bathed in amnion, breathless, fed by the motherbloodflow in the umbilical vein, fetal, slippery and tumbling over and over in the warmth of the beating womb, warm amnion, warmnion.

I make my patients feel like they’re still part of life, part of some grand nutty scheme instead of alone with their diseases. With me, they still feel part of the human race.

The main source of illness in this world is the doctor’s own illness: his compulsion to try to cure and his fraudulent belief that he can.

I make them feel like they’re still part of life, part of some grand nutty scheme instead of alone with their diseases, which, most of the time and especially in the Clinic, don’t hardly exist at all. With me, they feel they’re still part of the human race.

The thing is,” said Gilheeny, “is that we live in constant fear of our lives. It makes the blood pressure elevate like an Arabian geyser, and the tension headaches we get would knock the balls off a bull with the twist in the maxillary sinuses themselves.

It ain’t easy to do nothing, now that society is telling everyone that their body is fundamentally flawed and about to self-destruct. People are afraid they’re on the verge of death all the time.