No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEIn an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain.
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We’re losing a ritual. We’re losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.
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The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
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Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
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You live it forward, but understand it backward.
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There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’
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What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?
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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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…guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
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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 love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.
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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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Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.
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Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”….I met his gaze and I did not blink. “Words of comfort,” I said to my father.
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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