There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThe most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
-
-
As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
If we are fortunate, we ‘beat’ the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having ‘succumbed after a long battle.’
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
When you win, you often lose, that’s just a fact. There’s no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care … it is another story altogether.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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 -
It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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?
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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?’ ‘
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE