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 VERGHESEThat’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.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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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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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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We must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. but it can also deepen the wound.
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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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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school – not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
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The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
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I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI, or orthopedic consult.
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It was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
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The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
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Make something beautiful of your life.
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…guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
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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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The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE