Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken.
ABRAHAM VERGHESERituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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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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We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.
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She died chasing greatness and never saw it each time it was in her hand, so she kept seeking it elsewhere, but never understood the work required to get it or to keep it.
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You live it forward, but understand it backward.
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I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.
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Empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
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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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There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’
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Geography is destiny.
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What we are fighting isn’t godlessness–this is the most godly country on earth.
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Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
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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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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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I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America,
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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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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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No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
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A discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
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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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Make something beautiful of your life.
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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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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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I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around but he carried it off so well.
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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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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?
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Another day in paradise’ was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understand what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE