Abraham Verghese Quotes
Top 93 wise famous quotes and sayings by Abraham Verghese
Abraham Verghese Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Abraham Verghese on Wise Famous Quotes.
There wasn't any point in dwelling in the pain of the past, not when the future could hold suck pleasure.
It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive.
Memory. p 380
Memory. p 380
No money, no church service, no eulogy,no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit. p 354
It was the very moment when I thought, At last, she is going to stay, but in fact it was her good-bye.
In working myself ragged, I felt integrated, I felt American, and I rarely had time to think of home.
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 ...
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.
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
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.
surely the laws of man, if not God, didn't allow it.
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.
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.
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.
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-
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
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'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.
The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.
What a bad idea it had been to give the Bible to anyone but priests, Ghosh thought. It made a preacher out of everybody.
To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.
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.
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.
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?