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 VERGHESEIf ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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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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If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
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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.
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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, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.
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How we treat the least of our brethren,… that’s the measure of this country.
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Geography is destiny.
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What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it.
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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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…guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they’ll leave in people’s hearts.
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This is my life, I thought…I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil
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God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by–by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.
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Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
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Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.
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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
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Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken.
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The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
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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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Being the first born gives you great patience.
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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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A rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.
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Empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
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We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE