She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
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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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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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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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
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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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In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
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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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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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The Country Doctor Revisited captures the trials and tribulations of medicine, but also the satisfaction and the extraordinary rewards that come to those who embrace such a practice.
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…guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
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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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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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How we treat the least of our brethren,… that’s the measure of this country.
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Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family.
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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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You live it forward, but understand it backward.
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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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Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals
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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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By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
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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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The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. Its like a cancer thats metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?
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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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We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.
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There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’
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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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What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?
ABRAHAM VERGHESE