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 VERGHESEThe 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.
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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Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals
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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.’
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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.
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In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
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Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”… “Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223″… “
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That’s the funny thing about America–the blessed thing. As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others.
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He was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.
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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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Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
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How we treat the least of our brethren,… that’s the measure of this country.
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You live it forward, but understand it backward.
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Make something beautiful of your life.
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We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
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Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted
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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.
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Yesterday misspent can’t be recall’d Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.
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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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The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
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If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.
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Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else’s?’ And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.
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For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information.
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What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?
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And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.
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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
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In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE