If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEIt is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
-
-
Why settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can can play the ‘Gloria’? No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around but he carried it off so well.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I’ve had my share of angels.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
It’s an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
He was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Being the first born gives you great patience.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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 VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Geography is destiny.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
At times, with today’s advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America’s cities, but the variety of practices is enormous.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
A rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
What we are fighting isn’t godlessness–this is the most godly country on earth.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE