I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEIf seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a delayed flight
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
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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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It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
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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.
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Being the first born gives you great patience.
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When I use the word ‘healing’, by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we’re very good at handling, but there’s always a sense of the violation. ‘Why me?’ ‘
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To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.
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Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
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I’ve had my share of angels.
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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’.
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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.
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Geography is destiny.
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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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Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
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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;.
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I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?
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I’m a great believer in geography being destiny.
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Another day in paradise’ was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understand what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift.
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That’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.
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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.
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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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There are moments as a teacher when I’m conscious that I’m trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago.
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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.
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What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?
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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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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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE