We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEBy visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
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It’s an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.
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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.
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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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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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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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We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.
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I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net.
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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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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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A beautiful literary collection that tells of today’s country doctor, somewhat removed from our romantic black-bag image of days gone by, but still fulfilling an essential need in caring for spread-out populations.
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The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
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A discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
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We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE






