…guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEAnd 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’.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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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.
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 -
Make something beautiful of your life.
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I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI, or orthopedic consult.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
You are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. .
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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;.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
We’re losing a ritual. We’re losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Being the first born gives you great patience.
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If we are fortunate, we ‘beat’ the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having ‘succumbed after a long battle.’
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 -
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 blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
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Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
She died chasing greatness and never saw it each time it was in her hand, so she kept seeking it elsewhere, but never understood the work required to get it or to keep it.
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 -
To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.
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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 -
There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’
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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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 -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
He was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Geography is destiny.
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They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE