Put up with so much architecture they detested

O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today?

T. Wolfe, From Bauhaus to our house (1981), 1

But when medicine inures you to the idea of life, to survival, then it has failed utterly

To me, these were miracles enough. It is an old complaint about the practice of medicine that it inures you to the idea of death. But when medicine inures you to the idea of life, to survival, then it has failed utterly. The novelist Thomas Wolfe, recalling a lifelong struggle with illness, wrote in his last letter, “I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close.” I had not made the journey myself, and I had only seen the darkness reflected in the eyes of others. But surely, it was the most sublime moment of my clinical life to have watched that voyage in reverse, to encounter men and women returning from the strange country—to see them so very close, clambering back. 

S. Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies (2010), 400