Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.
ABRAHAM VERGHESETell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”….I met his gaze and I did not blink. “Words of comfort,” I said to my father.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
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I was angry with myself because I still loved her, or at least I loved that dream of our togetherness. My feelings were unreasonable, irrational, and I couldn’t change them. That hurt.
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Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted
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Being the first born gives you great patience.
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The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. Its like a cancer thats metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?
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Another day in paradise’ was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understand what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift.
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Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”… “Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223″… “
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My sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the ritual.
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Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
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Geography is destiny.
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She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
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Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?
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I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain.
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If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.
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What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE