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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEShe felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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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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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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
When I wake to the gift of yet another sunrise my first thought is to rouse him and say, I owe you the sight of morning.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
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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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And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
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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.’
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?
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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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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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No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
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No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
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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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE