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 VERGHESENot only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.
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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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What we are fighting isn’t godlessness–this is the most godly country on earth.
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Being the first born gives you great patience.
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Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
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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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What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?
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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 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.
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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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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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Don’t Let Him Know is a rich, evocative and brilliantly told tale of family, of loyalties, and of love that must stay secret.
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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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No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you.
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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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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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Why settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can can play the ‘Gloria’? No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you.
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Empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
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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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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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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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There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
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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.
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Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.
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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?
ABRAHAM VERGHESE