p40 - Medicine — and life — is more nuanced and grey than what the textbooks teach you.

p40 - “Line up the puzzle pieces in the correct order, your textbooks promised, and it will look just like the picture in the book.”

p41 - “But since your interest is in treating addictions, you may consider the ancient role of desire, of escape. Also, young doctor, note the space between you and your patient — its density, its sension, the opportunity. The next words spoken might change the appearane of the picture. … Addictions is the specialty of hiding? … Is the treatment, then, a kind of seeking?”

p52 - “the usual progression — pills prescribed, pills bought, pills snorted, heroin snorted, heroin in needles.”

p53 - “When it was pills, I knew what I could handle. For the most part. Then heroin was more tricky, but I was careful. Not greedy —- or at least not too greedy …. All the things I said I would never do, like needles … Then it was that I would never use fentanyl. Then I opened my eyes, and I was this close to being gone forever.”

p57 - all because of a simple fall.

p64 - doctors give you all of the opportunities to ruin your life and leave you to figure it out on your own.

p91 - infinite patience. “Maybe she should see the doctor, but now what would he say, now that she had missed so many? Another person to dissapoint.”

p103 - “a major challenge in treating opioid addiction is simply that people remember how good the drugs are?”

p226 - “You’re handing out revolvers instead of machine guns?”

p236 - “‘Is it worth it?’ asked Fitzgerald. ‘To have hope?’”

p238 - “Morphine relieves pain, until it ravages the user with suffering.”

p270 - “The fastest way is always to take things as slowly as possible.” ‘slow-is-fast’

p283 - “I am in a rush. My whole life is waiting!”

p289 - “‘I carry my patients around with me and that comppels me to do things.’ ‘That sounds like an addiction,’ she said”

p310 - “To a student of medicine, … I’m counting on you.”

p311 - “The hardest lesson is that we are not so different from our patients.”

p315 - “If Memorex is going to make people forget something, how can we be sure it’s not something very important?”

p316 - “‘Why at the zoo? ‘Have you ever had a very important experience at the zoo?’ … ‘Whatever your experience might be of the zoo, it’s not likely to be woven into the architecture of your life.’”

p324 - oh yeah Dr Chen go Claire into the trial and she was selected to be a “control”, but she didn’t follow the directions that were given to the control group and instead focused on solving her cure. This ruined the trial and Chen was no longer seen as a reliable source of trial patients like he had been (which he got from Fitzgerald’s house).