The Country Doctor Revisited captures the trials and tribulations of medicine, but also the satisfaction and the extraordinary rewards that come to those who embrace such a practice.
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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By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
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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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If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
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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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Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
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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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I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician.
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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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Yesterday misspent can’t be recall’d Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.
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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.
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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.
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I’m a great believer in geography being destiny.
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Empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
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In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
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Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken.
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If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more.
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What we are fighting isn’t godlessness–this is the most godly country on earth.
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And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.
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Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”… “Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223″… “
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Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family.
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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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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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She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life…
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You live it forward, but understand it backward.
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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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I’ve had my share of angels.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE