And pray, why would this number interest us?” “It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, ‘One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes’.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEHow we treat the least of our brethren,… that’s the measure of this country.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
-
-
I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it’s only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I’ve had my share of angels.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
It’s an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by–by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.
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 -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
A discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”… “Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223″… “
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Why settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can can play the ‘Gloria’? No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you.
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 -
At times, with today’s advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America’s cities, but the variety of practices is enormous.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.
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 are fighting isn’t godlessness–this is the most godly country on earth.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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 -
What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America,
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 -
For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE