The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
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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A rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.
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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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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 ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
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God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by–by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.
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According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did.
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Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.
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What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?
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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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We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.
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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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Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
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Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
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The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t.
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I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.
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No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
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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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Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
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There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’
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Being the first born gives you great patience.
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I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician.
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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.
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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
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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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Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
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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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE