By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
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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If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
We must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. but it can also deepen the wound.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I’m a great believer in geography being destiny.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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 -
Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
The process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialised language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve;.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE