Meredith: (opening voiceover) Surgeons aren't known for being warm and cuddly. They're arrogant, impatient, mean as often as not. You'd think they wouldn't have friends, 'cause who could stand them? But surgeons are like a bad cold. Nasty, but persistent.

Callie: I had a patient a couple of years ago. Young guy, fifty maybe. Simple knee replacement. He was post-op, he was fine. I even told his wife she could go and get him lunch. It was a simple knee replacement, it as nothing. But he'd been getting short of breath so I put him on blood thinners for a post-surgical P.E. and it wasn't until he was vomiting up dark red blood, looking me in the eye, telling me he was dying, that I figured it out. That I was wrong. That it wasn't a P.E., he was bleeding internally. And it wouldn't have been fatal, but blood thinners. I will never forget the look on his wife's face when she came back with that sandwich in her hand, asking me why her husband wasn't in his room any more.
Derek: How do you live with it? Killing him? Taking him from his wife? How do you live with it?

Izzie: They were calling the guy "Blowhole," Cristina. Not just the interns, Alex. What are they going to call me when I'm the patient? Swiss cheese for brains?
Cristina: No. That's awkward and long. Blowhole's pithy.

Owen: Shepherd's been gone all week. I'm sure the Chief would notice --
Bailey: Hunt! You survived a war. You can do this.
Owen: I know I can do this. I'm saying I don't want to. People don't really say no to you, do they?
Bailey: Not when I say please. I'm saying please.

George: Mer, there is something wrong with Izzie.
Meredith: Ah, what do you mean?
George: I don't know. All I know that there is something wrong.
Meredith: Well you know, George, we're already drowning in intern drama. We don't need resident drama, too.

Derek: Thanks for coming.
Meredith: Thanks for calling.
Derek: I love you.
Meredith: I know.
Derek: Would you still love me if i wasn't a surgeon?
Meredith: No. No, because Izzie has cancer that has spread to her brain. You're one of about twenty people in the world who can save her. I don't know if I can respect somebody who can walk away from a gift like that. So, please don't. Here are her scans. It's pretty bad.

Derek: I don't think I can get her back.
Chief: Did you call her?
Derek: What am I going to say?
Chief: I had an affair for years and when Adele found out somehow she ... she took me back. You can make your way back from anything.

Meredith: (closing voiceover) Practicing medicine doesn't lend itself well to the making of friends. Maybe because life and mortality are in our faces all the time. Maybe because, in staring down death every day, we're forced to know that life, every minute, is borrowed time. And each person we let ourselves care about is just one more loss somewhere down the line. For this reason, I know some doctors who just don't bother making friends at all. But the rest of us, we make it our job to move that line, to push each loss as far away as we can.

Episode Title: Stand By Me

"Stand By Me" is the title of a song by Ben E. King.