Abraham Verghese quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Abraham Verghese on Wise Famous Quotes.

When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.

There wasn't any point in dwelling in the pain of the past, not when the future could hold suck pleasure.

One operates in the now.

It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive.
Memory. p 380

The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.

No money, no church service, no eulogy,no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit. p 354

Sometimes, if you think you're sick, you will be.

In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.

It was the very moment when I thought, At last, she is going to stay, but in fact it was her good-bye.

it the bloody-brinjal-and-bugger-all. Which is

In working myself ragged, I felt integrated, I felt American, and I rarely had time to think of home.

A fool with a tool is still a fool.

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 ...

And there will be no more interruptions and you will be staying for dessert, coffee, and cigars.

Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted

How beautiful and horrible life is, Hema thought; too horrible to simply call tragic. Life is worse than tragic. p 108

Do the right thing, put up with unfairness, selfishness, stay true to yourself ... one day it all works out.

My advice for writers is to get a good day job. It takes the pressure off writing if you have a job that pays the bills.

Doubt is a first cousin to faith, Ghosh. To have faith, you have to suspend your disbelief.

What neither the reader nor Stone would accept was that his self-amputation was as much and act of conceit as it was an act of heroism p 61

Men like him became stubborn with opposition, because their convictions were all they had.

The tide had turned, and the worst possible thing had happened: my heroes had become the "bad guys," and one didn't dare say otherwise.

Surely you couldn't be a good doctor and a terrible human being
surely the laws of man, if not God, didn't allow it.

Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals

Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.

A world where a sparrow's fate and that of a man can be decided in the blink of a cat's eye, such is the true measure of time.

You see, young Dr. Marion, that's what makes us human. We always want more.

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.

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.

Impending death had a way of unexpectedly unearthing the past so that it came together with the present in an unholy coupling.

You live it forward, but understand it backward.

Guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.

All my ghosts had vanished; the retribution that they sought had been exacted. I had nothing more to give, and nothing to fear.

Yesterday misspent can't be recall'd
Vanity makes beauty contemptible
Wisdom is more valuable than riches.

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

The uneventful day is a precious gift.

Tizitash zeweter wode ene eye metah. I can't help thinking about you.

A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.

What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?

Geography is destiny.

Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.

Make something beautiful of your life.

The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.

When you have a natural genetic tan developed over centuries and many generations, the idea of soaking up rays by the pool has never made sense.

Sisters of the Nigrizia

Telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology.

The croup following measles, on top of malnutrition, on top of rickets," he said to me under his breath. "It's the cascade of catastrophies.

Envy Is Behind Flattery.

A man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world ...

Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.

A child's ability for reprisal is infinite, and can last a lifetime.

She drew others to her like acolytes only for them to discover she wasn't recruiting.

All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them.

The fact that people were attentive to his body does not compensate for their ignoring his being.

In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.

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 ...

Lest it sound as if I resent my day job, I have to say that my day job is the reason I write, and it has been the best thing for me as a writer.

No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.

When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right." Harris

By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.

She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.

Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.

If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.

I'd become aware of human complexity
that's a kinder word than deceit.

Everyone needed an obsession.

Your "Gloria" lives within you.

What a journey ... what a day ... what madness, so much worse than tragic! What to do except dance, dance, only dance ...

You can't show up at the bedside and then turn on your skills. You have to keep your game sharp all the time.

We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

She found her greatness, at last, found it in her suffering. Once you have greatness, who needs anything else?

I knew what I'd say to him: You're much too late. We went ahead with our lives without you.

The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.

I'm so sorry,' Stone said. I don't know whether he was speaking to me, or Ghosh, or the universe. It wasn't enough, but it was about time.

We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.

The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.

Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
From Cutting for Stone

A good surgeon needs courage for which a good pair of balls is a prerequisite,

amanuensis. A rapt

What a bad idea it had been to give the Bible to anyone but priests, Ghosh thought. It made a preacher out of everybody.

Now I saw this categorizing of my freezer food as a sign of the true chaos in my head.

To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.

happened has happened, be will be

So I consider myself a dog person. Kind of. Had dogs when I was a kid, but my parents would never have dreamed of having them in the house.

I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.

What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

People change, you know. When you leave your country, you are like a plant taken out of soil. Some people turn hard, they can't flower again.

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

Nevertheless, I drove right past my landmark, an antique store which looked to me like an ordinary house with junk piled on the front porch.

All possibilities resided within me, and they required me to be here. If I left, what would be left of me?

Her unhandsome, but beautiful friend of so many years ...

...his crime was to belong to the losing side, or perhaps even the wrong side. But all he'd done was follow orders...

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.