I always wondered if the good people who send us bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate.
ABRAHAM VERGHESELife for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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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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When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.
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To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.
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He was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.
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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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The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you
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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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I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?
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Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
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There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’
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What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?
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In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
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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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If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.
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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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This 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
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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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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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A rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.
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I was angry with myself because I still loved her, or at least I loved that dream of our togetherness. My feelings were unreasonable, irrational, and I couldn’t change them. That hurt.
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It’s an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.
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According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did.
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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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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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You are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. .
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I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and but for their services, I’m not sure how exactly we could manage.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE