Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEHe was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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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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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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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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She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
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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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It was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
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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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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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She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life…
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Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?
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There are moments as a teacher when I’m conscious that I’m trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago.
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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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Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
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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.’
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Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”… “Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223″… “
ABRAHAM VERGHESE