I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don’t postpone your dreams.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEIn writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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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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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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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 most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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 -
Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care … it is another story altogether.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
When I wake to the gift of yet another sunrise my first thought is to rouse him and say, I owe you the sight of morning.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”….I met his gaze and I did not blink. “Words of comfort,” I said to my father.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
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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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE