Abraham Verghese Quotes
Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted
A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.
When I wake to the gift of yet another sunrise my first thought is to rouse him and say, I owe you the sight of morning.
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.
The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.
Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.
I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI, or orthopedic consult.
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.
We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.
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.
The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
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.
There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him.
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.
I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain.
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.
By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
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.
I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.
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. I've had my share of angels.
The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by--by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace.
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.
Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.
Another day in paradise' was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understand what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift.
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.
We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
