Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school – not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEMy VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they’ll leave in people’s hearts.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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A discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
And pray, why would this number interest us?” “It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, ‘One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes’.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
At times, with today’s advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America’s cities, but the variety of practices is enormous.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and but for their services, I’m not sure how exactly we could manage.
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Why settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can can play the ‘Gloria’? No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life…
ABRAHAM VERGHESE