As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.
ABRAHAM VERGHESELife, 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.
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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Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care … it is another story altogether.
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She died chasing greatness and never saw it each time it was in her hand, so she kept seeking it elsewhere, but never understood the work required to get it or to keep it.
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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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When I use the word ‘healing’, by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we’re very good at handling, but there’s always a sense of the violation. ‘Why me?’ ‘
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How we treat the least of our brethren,… that’s the measure of this country.
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The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
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If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
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By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
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I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it’s only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.
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The 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.
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Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.
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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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No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you.
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Make something beautiful of your life.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE






