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 VERGHESEIf it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.
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We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.
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If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
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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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If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.
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He was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.
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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.
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The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
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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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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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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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For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information.
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We’re losing a ritual. We’re losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.
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A beautiful literary collection that tells of today’s country doctor, somewhat removed from our romantic black-bag image of days gone by, but still fulfilling an essential need in caring for spread-out populations.
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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