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?
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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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
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She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
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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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If seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a delayed flight
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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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Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
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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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As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.
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What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?
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I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don’t postpone your dreams.
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I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician.
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Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.
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I always wondered if the good people who send us bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate.
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Make something beautiful of your life.
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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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE






