I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEMy sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the ritual.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
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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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My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they’ll leave in people’s hearts.
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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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I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.
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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. .
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When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.
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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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Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
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In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we ‘battle’ cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation.
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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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We must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. but it can also deepen the wound.
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Make something beautiful of your life.
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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.
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Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE






