There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThe crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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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.
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There are moments as a teacher when I’m conscious that I’m trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago.
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In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
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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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If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.
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Geography is destiny.
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Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?
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She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life…
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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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The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
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A discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
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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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There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’
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If seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a delayed flight
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No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
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My sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the ritual.
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Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
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The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. Its like a cancer thats metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?
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Empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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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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In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
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I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.
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I’m a great believer in geography being destiny.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE