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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEWe are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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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.
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There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’
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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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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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My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they’ll leave in people’s hearts.
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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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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
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In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
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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.
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Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
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A discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
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Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?
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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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Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”… “Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223″… “
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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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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
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You live it forward, but understand it backward.
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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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That’s the funny thing about America–the blessed thing. As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others.
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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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The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
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Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.
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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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When I use the word ‘healing’, by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we’re very good at handling, but there’s always a sense of the violation. ‘Why me?’ ‘
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It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE