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’.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEI was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don’t postpone your dreams.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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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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They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
How we treat the least of our brethren,… that’s the measure of this country.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
…guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
When you win, you often lose, that’s just a fact. There’s no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and but for their services, I’m not sure how exactly we could manage.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
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Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It’s a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you owe them nothing.
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Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE