A discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEI 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.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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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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There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
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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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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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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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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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For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information.
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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.
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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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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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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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A rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.
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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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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE