No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEWe 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.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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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That’s the funny thing about America–the blessed thing. As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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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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 have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
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 -
Geography is destiny.
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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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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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Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.
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Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care … it is another story altogether.
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Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE