The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEWe know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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Make something beautiful of your life.
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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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We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.
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I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and but for their services, I’m not sure how exactly we could manage.
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I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America,
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The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.
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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 -
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?
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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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Empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
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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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She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life…
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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 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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And 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’.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE