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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEAs she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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I 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.
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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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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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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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Make something beautiful of your life.
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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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I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?
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The process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialised language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve;.
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The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
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Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”… “Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223″… “
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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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He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him.
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Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted
ABRAHAM VERGHESE