Meredith Grey quotes from Grey's Anatomy

Meredith

[voiceover] Every little kid knows the words to the song. "The foot bone is connected to the leg bone. The leg bone is connected to the knee bone. In med school you learn it's a bitter more complicated than that, but still the song not wrong. Everything is connected. "The foot bone is connected to the leg bone, the leg bone is connected to the knee bone. And if you take one piece out, the rest just falls apart.

Meredith

[voiceover] The human body is made of systems that keep it alive. There's the one that keeps you breathing and the one that keeps you standing. The one that makes you hungry and the one that makes you happy. They are all connected, take that piece out and everything else falls apart. And it's only when our support system look like they might fail us, that we realize how much we've depended on all along.

Meredith

[voiceover] When you are a kid you always want things to stay the same. The same teachers, the same house, the same friends... Being a surgeon is no different. You get used to the same attendings, the same scrub nurses, the same hospital. Of course that all changes the minute fifth year comes around and you have to find a new job.

Meredith

[voiceover] It's one of those things people say. You can’t move on until you let go of with the past. Letting go is the easy part, it's the moving on that's painful. So sometimes we fight it, trying to keep things the same. Things can't stay the same though. At some point you just have to let it go. Move on. Because no matter how painful it is. It's the only way we grow.

Meredith

[voiceover] Picture this, you've spent the past five years of your residency training to become a surgeon. But those five years, suddenly don't matter. The only thing that matters, the only thing between you and your career is a test. In a random hotel, in a random place with a random examiner asking you random questions. Nervous? You should be.

Meredith

[voiceover] Kindergarten. High school. College. Med School. Residency. That all leads to this moment. Some people can crack under the pressure others thrive. Either way there's nothing left to do. No more studying no more preparing. Like it or not the moment has arrived. The only thing left you to do is show up.

Meredith

[voiceover] Carpe diem. How annoying is carpe diem? How are you supposed to plan a life? A career? A family? If you're always "carpe"-ing the "diem"? If we all seized every moment of every day, there wouldn't be doctors. Who'd sit through med school? We'd all be too busy living in the now, whatever that means.

Meredith

[voiceover]: I'll admit the Romans had a point. You gotta to live life. And living means that every morning when you wake up you have to chose between seizing what life offers in the moment and forging ahead, no matter the weather or closing the curtains and shutting out the day.

Meredith

[voiceover]: So there is this bird, some sort of swallow I think. Every September thousand of them ditch rainy Seattle to winter in Mexico. These birds aren't dumb. And every year crowds of people gather around to drink beer and watch the flocks take off. They call it the Great Migration.

Meredith

[voiceover]: I don't know how those birds do it. Travel thousand of miles without getting lost. Banging into windows, being eaten by cats. But every spring they are always here. I guess they come back to what they know. People say it's pretty cool watching them go. They say you can actually see the moment when at some mysterious signal, all at once, the birds decide to leave. So maybe I've been missing out. Whatever. There's always next year.

Meredith

[voiceover] The years we spend as surgical residents will be the best and worst of our lives. We will be pushed to our breaking point. This is the starting line. This is our arena. How well we play? That's up to us.

Meredith

[voice over] They say death is hardest on the living. It’s tough to actually say goodbye. Sometimes it’s impossible. You never really stop feeling the loss. It’s what makes things so bittersweet. We leave little bits of ourselves behind, little reminders, a lifetime of memories, photos, trinkets, things to remember us by… even when we’re gone.

Meredith

[voice over] I had this memory game when I was a kid. A bunch of cards faced down in rows. Each card has a picture. You turn one over, look at it, then turn it back over. Then you have to try to remember where its matching card was. Sometimes you have no idea, and other times you chose exactly what you need to see. The cards seem completely out of order and random but you keep turning them over and the more cards you see.. you get the sense of how everything fits together.

Meredith

[voice over] You were right, about all of it. You were right. This is a place where horrible things happen. You were right to go - you're probably escaping disaster. Look at me, I practically grew up here. And you're right, it's hurt me in ways I'll probably never get over. I have a lot of memories of people, people I've lost forever, but I have a lot of other memories too. This is the place where I fell in love. The place where I found my family. This is where I learned to be a doctor, where I learned to take responsibility for someone else's life. And it's the place I met you so I figure this place has given me as much as it has taken from me. I've lived here as much as I've survived here, it just depends on how I look at it. I'm gonna choose to look at it that way and remember you that way.

Meredith

[voice over] Surgeons don't compromise. We defy death, we exceed perfection. We operate for seventeen hours straight if we have to. We aren't built to settle, but that doesn't mean we won't.