It will never grow old...

"I think there's a point where you realize the world has just been revealed to you. It's like realizing your parents are both good and bad. It's sort of, Oh no, thiings will never be quite the same again."

"The fact that any sort of religious faith was so disdained at Harvard and so important to the poor- not just in Haiti but elsewhere, too- made me even more convinced that faith must be something good."

"People think we're unrealistic. They don't know we're crazy."

"He wasn't put on earth to make anyone feel comfortable, except for those lucky enough to be his patients, and for the moment I had become one of those."

"Let's celebrate him. Let's make sure people are inspired by him. But we can't say anybody should or could be just like him." He added, "Because if the poor have to wait for a lot of people like Paul to come along before they get good health care, they are totally fucked."

"One can never work overtime for the poor. We're only scrambling to make up for our deficiencies."

"It's through journeys to the sick that we identify needs and problems."

"I remember the sound of Voodoo drums wafting into the army barracks in Mirebalais at night and how unsettling it was to some of us sitting there, in all its mystery. I'm sure we'd have felt different if we'd known we were probably hearing ceremonies to cure the sick. For myself, right now, I like the sound, like so many hearts beating through a single stethoscope."

"And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn't care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He's still going to make these hikes, he'd insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others', and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world. I think he undertakes what, earlier today, he called 'journeys to the sick' in part because he has to, in order to keep going. 'That's when I feel most alive,' he told me once on an airplane, 'when I'm helping people.' He makes these house calls regularly and usually without blan witnesses, at times when no one from Harvard of WHO can see him kneeling on mud floors with his stethoscope plugged in. This matters to him, I think-to feel, at least occasionally, that he doctors in obsurity, so that he knows he doctors first of all because he believes it's the right thing to do."