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 VERGHESEThe 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.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
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We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.
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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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What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?
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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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In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
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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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If we are fortunate, we ‘beat’ the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having ‘succumbed after a long battle.’
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He was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.
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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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The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you
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Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else’s?’ And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.
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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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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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I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE






