Eric Tian

From Les Misérables by Victor Hugo:

Gradually, they began to talk. Overflow succeeded to silence, which is fullness. The night was serene and glorious above their heads. These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything, their dreams, their frenzies, their ecstasies, their chimeras, their despondencies, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had longed for each other, their despair when they had ceased to see each other. They had confided to each other in an intimacy of the ideal, which already, nothing could have increased, all that was most hidden and most mysterious in themselves. They told each other, with a candid faith in their illusions, all that love, youth and the remnant of childhood that was theirs, brought to mind. These two hearts poured themselves out to each other, so that at the end of an hour, it was the young man who had the young girl’s soul and the young girl who had the soul of the young man. They interpenetrated, they enchanted, they dazzled each other.

When they had finished, when they had told each other everything, she laid her head on his shoulder, and asked him: “What is your name?”

“My name is Marius,” he said. “And yours?”
“My name is Cosette.”

From The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran:

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

Last week I was riding home from the hospital after a long day and it was raining, like really raining, where each drop hurts a little when it hits and the cars have their windscreen wipers on the highest gear (except my glasses don’t have windscreen wipers) and the roads become little rivers and you pray the rivers are shallow enough for safe riding.

I was struggling up a hill, fully soaked, breathing heavily and feeling a little sorry for myself when I noticed a person running towards me. He was a caucasian man with a bald head and he wore no shirt, just a pair of running shorts and sneakers. He was sprinting down the hill while I was slowly riding up it.

“Hey!” I heard a voice shout. I kept riding, trying not to slip on the wet road. “Hey!” I looked up.

“Great weather, isn’t it?” And with this, he flew past me, laughing like a child, into the rivers below.

From Paper Towns by John Green:

“My heart is really pounding.”

“That’s how you know you’re having fun,” Margo said.

…

“As long as we don’t die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.”

I’ve recently been spending a few minutes each morning taking in the Astronomy Picture of the Day.

It never fails to instil in me a sense of awe at our galaxy and our place in it.

It is a humbling reminder of the vastness and beauty of life.

Today I asked a patient, only minutes before they went into the operating theatre, how they were feeling. I was met with a smile.

“Whatever happens, good or bad, it will be awesome.”

Star Trek actor William Shatner on his voyage into space:

“I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.”

The longer my days are filled with work, study and responsibilities, the more I realise the importance of art.

Our lives can be difficult, draining and soul-crushingly mundane, and our world might seem a little less exciting. But this is where art, whose responsibility is to create feeling, provides its greatest role.

Art, in the form of books, music, movies and paintings and more, is a reminder of the beauty that exists around us, a beauty that is breathtaking, that drags us out of our little bubble, into new universes of possibility. The further we get bogged down in our little tasks, the more crucial it is an antidote to apathy.

From Where The Crawdads Sing by Deila Owens:

After only minutes, he said, “See, you can already write a word.”

“What d’ya mean?”

“C-a-b. You can write the word cab.“

“What’s cab?” she asked. He knew not to laugh.

“Don’t worry if you don’t know it. Let’s keep going. Soon you’ll write a word you know.”

Later he said, “You’ll have to work lots more on the alphabet. It’ll take a little while to get it, but you can already read a bit. I’ll show you.” He didn’t have a grammar reader, so her first book was his dad’s copy of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. He pointed to the opening sentence and asked her to read it back to him. The first word was There and she had to go back to the alphabet and practice the sound of each letter, but he was patient, explaining the special sound of th, and when she finally said it, she threw her arms up and laughed. Beaming, he watched her.

Slowly, she unraveled each word of the sentence: “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

“You can read, Kya. There will never be a time again when you can’t read.”

“It ain’t just that.” She spoke almost in a whisper. “I wadn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.”

He smiled. “That’s a very good sentence. Not all words hold that much.”

From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Watashiato

n. curiosity about the impact you’ve had on the lives of the people you know, wondering which of your harmless actions or long-forgotten words might have altered the plot of their stories in ways you’ll never get to see.

One of the most beautiful and terrifying things about medicine is how much you can affect a person’s life. When medicine is done right, it can be a wonderfully healing and inspiring experience. Illnesses cured, health restored, hope recovered. When medicine is done wrong – and there are so so many ways where it can go wrong – the result can be catastrophic.

It is a cause of much anxiety and hope.