Annekathryn Goodman: This is a place of lost treasures: lost lives, families, limbs, homes, work, wishes, hopes, and futures. It is easy to lose one's name here. Each day, a new woman in active labor arrives. In my last 24 hours in Haiti, four women deliver their babies in our hospital. Each difficult labor reflects the trauma and insecurity of this shifting world. I notice that every woman in labor wants to be held. We develop a system whereby one of us sits behind the woman and holds her, another rubs her back, and I sit or kneel near her, touching her belly and legs, whispering words of encouragement. I pray, and I watch the woman's face for clues as the labor progresses. After the lost children arrive, I notice the similarities in the way we cradle them and the way we hold the laboring women. This ministry of hugs reflects our desperate attempt to stabilize the random, cruel chaos in this world of loss and grief.
David Foster Wallace: If you've never wept and want to, have a child.
Atul Gawande: The social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific.
Caterina Fake: So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard. Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be.
Temple Grandin: When I was younger I was looking for this magic meaning of life. It's very simple now. Making the lives of others better, doing something of lasting value, that's the meaning of life, it's that simple.
Paul Romer: A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
Decius: Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are. It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.
Ministry of Touch | 
