If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEEmpathy can be replaced by cynicism.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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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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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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And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.
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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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No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
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I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.
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Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken.
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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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This is my life, I thought…I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil
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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school – not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
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Yesterday misspent can’t be recall’d Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.
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We must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. but it can also deepen the wound.
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Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
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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