My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession
ABRAHAM VERGHESEIf you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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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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Another day in paradise’ was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understand what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift.
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No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you.
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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.
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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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The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
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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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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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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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Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care … it is another story altogether.
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She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
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We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.
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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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We must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. but it can also deepen the wound.
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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.’
ABRAHAM VERGHESE