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 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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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 VERGHESE -
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
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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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If we are fortunate, we ‘beat’ the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having ‘succumbed after a long battle.’
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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 are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
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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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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?
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it.
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We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients.
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Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.
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Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
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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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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.
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I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net.
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Geography is destiny.
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A rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.
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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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I’m a great believer in geography being destiny.
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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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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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That’s the funny thing about America–the blessed thing. As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others.
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According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did.
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The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
You are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. .
ABRAHAM VERGHESE