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 VERGHESEWe must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. but it can also deepen the wound.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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Don’t Let Him Know is a rich, evocative and brilliantly told tale of family, of loyalties, and of love that must stay secret.
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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.
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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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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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Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
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We’re losing a ritual. We’re losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.
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When you win, you often lose, that’s just a fact. There’s no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart.
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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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What we are fighting isn’t godlessness–this is the most godly country on earth.
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We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients.
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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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I’m a great believer in geography being destiny.
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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
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There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’
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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 VERGHESE