The Country Doctor Revisited captures the trials and tribulations of medicine, but also the satisfaction and the extraordinary rewards that come to those who embrace such a practice.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThe 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;.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?
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Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”… “Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223″… “
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Make something beautiful of your life.
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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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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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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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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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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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Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.
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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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…guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
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We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.
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Sandip Roy has broken new ground in this tale of the modern Indian family. A lovely read
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Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
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She died chasing greatness and never saw it each time it was in her hand, so she kept seeking it elsewhere, but never understood the work required to get it or to keep it.
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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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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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I’m a great believer in geography being destiny.
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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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There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
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She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life…
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Empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
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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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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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I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net.
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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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