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"Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession's practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they're entering is a hospital's fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls. And this is why a hospital M.D.--who's usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and who almost always smells unusually clean and good--approaches any psych patient under this care with a professional manner somewhere between bland and deep, a distant but sincere concern that's divided evenly between the patient's subjective discomfort and the hard facts of the case."
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Exlpore more Medicine quotes
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Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace
"It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art."
"I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art."
"For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire's still going."
"One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism."
"We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life "outside" the story changes the story."
"I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader."
"Pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It's probably more Western than U.S. per se."
"We're kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we're uneasy about the fact that we wish they'd come back - I mean, what's wrong with us?"
"When people call it that I always get pissed off because I always think depression sounds like you just get like really sad, you get quiet and melancholy and just like sit quietly by the window sighing or just lying around. A state of not caring about anything. A kind of blue kind of peaceful state."
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