I think of Gould and his essay every time I have a patient with a terminal illness. There is almost always a long tail of possibility, however thin. … - Atul Gawande

The trouble is that we’ve built our medical system and culture around the long tail. We’ve created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets — and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.

This is what it means to have autonomy - you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

One has to decide whether one’s fears or one’s hopes are what should matter most.

Human beings have an ability to simply recognize the right thing to do sometimes. Judgment, Klein points out, is rarely a calculated weighing of all options, which we are not good at anyway, but instead an unconscious form of pattern recognition.