The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThe only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEYour 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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEWhy settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can can play the ‘Gloria’? No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEWhat we are fighting isn’t godlessness–this is the most godly country on earth.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEWhen a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEStill, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThe 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 VERGHESEA rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEIt was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEHow we treat the least of our brethren,… that’s the measure of this country.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThere is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
ABRAHAM VERGHESEIf ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEI’m a great believer in geography being destiny.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThis is my life, I thought…I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEAnd then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE