I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America,
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThe bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around but he carried it off so well.
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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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I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician.
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They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.
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Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
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She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of 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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My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession
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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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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
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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 always wondered if the good people who send us bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate.
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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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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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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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If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more.
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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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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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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.
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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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Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals
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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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If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.
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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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE