There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThe rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI, or orthopedic consult.
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What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?
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According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did.
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And pray, why would this number interest us?” “It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, ‘One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes’.
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It was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
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I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America,
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If we are fortunate, we ‘beat’ the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having ‘succumbed after a long battle.’
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We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients.
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My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they’ll leave in people’s hearts.
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Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.
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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t.
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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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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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Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE