Top 100 Abraham Verghese Quotes
#1. Life is full of signs. The trick is to know how to read them. Ghosh called this heuristics, a method for solving a problem for which no formula exists.
Abraham Verghese
#2. Don't know how many minutes I stood there. It was precisely the comfort she seemed to need this night. If only she had known to ask, or I to give, we could've done away with the blindfold ... Thank God for the blindfold. She
Abraham Verghese
#3. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#5. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#7. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#8. Love so strong, without ebb and flow or crests and troughs, indeed lacking any sort of motion so that it had become invisible to him these seven years, part of the order of things outside his head which he had taken for granted.
Abraham Verghese
#9. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#10. Tizitash zeweter wode ene eye metah. I can't help thinking about you.
Abraham Verghese
#11. The fact that people were attentive to his body does not compensate for their ignoring his being.
Abraham Verghese
#12. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#14. A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.
Abraham Verghese
#15. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#16. The incredible cinematography makes 'A Walk to Beautiful' almost like a poem; there is a tenderness on display that seems to emanate from the camera. There is also great sensitivity to the women whose stories are being told - never did I have a sense of the subjects being exploited.
Abraham Verghese
#17. I've never bought this idea of taking a therapeutic distance. If I see a student or house staff cry, I take great faith in that. That's a great person; they're going to be a great doctor.
Abraham Verghese
#19. the clerk in the ministry to correct this, he pulled out his original typescript. "See for yourself, madam. Quod erat demonstrandum it is Missing," he said, as if he'd proved Pythagoras's theorem, the sun's central position in the solar system, the roundness of the
Abraham Verghese
#20. My deceased patients have taught me over the years to believe in the glass half full, to make good use of the time we have, to be generous - that was their lesson for the Uber-mind, and it was free. 'Do that,' they said, 'and then perhaps death shall have no dominion.'
Abraham Verghese
#21. Medicine, you see, is my first love; whether I write fiction or nonfiction, and even when it has nothing to do with medicine, it's still about medicine. After all, what is medicine but life plus? So I write about life.
Abraham Verghese
#22. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#23. She found her greatness, at last, found it in her suffering. Once you have greatness, who needs anything else?
Abraham Verghese
#24. I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.
Abraham Verghese
#25. When you look around Addis and see children barefoot and shivering in the rain, when you see the lepers begging for their next morsel, does any of that Monophysitic nonsense matter the least bit?" Matron
Abraham Verghese
#26. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#27. I'm the first to admit that the resolution of a hand feeling the belly doesn't compare with the resolution of a CAT scan scanning the belly, but only my hand can say that it hurts at this spot and not at this spot. Only my hand can say that.
Abraham Verghese
#28. He had a theory that bedroom Amharic and bedside Amharic were really the same thing: Please lie down. Take off your shirt. Open your mouth. Take a deep breath ... The language of love was the same as the language of medicine.
Abraham Verghese
#29. It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive.
Memory. p 380
Abraham Verghese
#30. All my ghosts had vanished; the retribution that they sought had been exacted. I had nothing more to give, and nothing to fear.
Abraham Verghese
#31. In working myself ragged, I felt integrated, I felt American, and I rarely had time to think of home.
Abraham Verghese
#32. My sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the ritual.
Abraham Verghese
#33. ...his crime was to belong to the losing side, or perhaps even the wrong side. But all he'd done was follow orders...
Abraham Verghese
#34. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#36. The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
Abraham Verghese
#37. I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.
Abraham Verghese
#38. He invited me to a world that wasn't secret, but it was well hidden. You needed a guide. You had to know what to look for, but also how to look. You had to exert yourself to see this world. p 224
Abraham Verghese
#39. I felt sorry that he had suffered so long in the hospital, sorry that even in his last minutes our mindless technology had so rudely interrupted his transition
Abraham Verghese
#40. In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
Abraham Verghese
#41. It seems we humans never learn. And so we relearn the lesson every generation and then want to write epistles. We proselytize to our friends and shake them by the shoulders and tell them, Seize the day! What matters is THIS moment!
Abraham Verghese
#42. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#43. All possibilities resided within me, and they required me to be here. If I left, what would be left of me?
Abraham Verghese
#44. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#45. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#46. I think legislation needs to put an end to doctors profiting on businesses to which they can funnel patients - that is business, not medicine. If you try to call it medicine, then it is corruption. Without legislation, it will keep happening.
Abraham Verghese
#47. I realized that my father's absence is our slippers. In order to start to get rid of your slippers, you have to admit they are yours, and if you do, then they will get rid of themselves.
Abraham Verghese
#48. We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
Abraham Verghese
#50. Lets take away the incentives to do 'to' patients and instead create incentives to do 'for' patients, to be 'with' patients. We don't need to do comparative effectiveness trials to see if that works; we can just ask patients.
Abraham Verghese
#51. I don't think you can be a physician and not see yourself reflected in your patient's illness. How would I deal with the kind of news I'd given Mr. Walters?
Abraham Verghese
#52. An admonishment of sorts, the gentle warning of one who arrived on an earlier ship: You there! Listen! Independence and resilience. This is what the new immigrant needs. Don't get fooled by all this activity. Don't invoke the superorganism. No, no. One functions alone in America. Begin now.
Abraham Verghese
#53. I'm ashamed of our human capacity to hurt and maim one another, to desecrate the body. Yet it allows me to see the cabalistic harmony of heart peeking out behind lung, of liver and spleen consulting each other under the dome of the diaphragm
these things leave me speechless.
Abraham Verghese
#54. I'm a proud American - becoming a citizen in 1988 was one of the most profoundly moving occasions in my life; I'm a former Texan and a recent Californian.
Abraham Verghese
#55. I'd become aware of human complexity
that's a kinder word than deceit.
Abraham Verghese
#56. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#57. Why must I do what is hardest?" "Because, Marion, 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. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can play the 'Gloria'?
Abraham Verghese
#58. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#59. A man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world ...
Abraham Verghese
#60. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#61. No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
Abraham Verghese
#62. Ghosh trusted me to do whatever it is I would choose to do. That, too, is love. He'd been dead more than a quarter century and he was still teaching me about the trust that comes only from true love.
Abraham Verghese
#63. I write by stealing time. The hours in the day have never felt as if they belonged to me. The greatest number has belonged to my day job as a physician and professor of medicine - eight to 12 hours, and even more in the early days.
Abraham Verghese
#64. The key to your happines 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. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more.
Abraham Verghese
#65. Now I saw this categorizing of my freezer food as a sign of the true chaos in my head.
Abraham Verghese
#66. All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them.
Abraham Verghese
#67. There it was, Hema must have thought; it was both the sorry and the thank-you that was so long overdue, and the funny thing was that at this moment, she didn't care. It no longer mattered. She didn't even look his way.
Abraham Verghese
#68. The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.
Abraham Verghese
#69. By the time I learned to say "Six-inch number seven on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce," the sound, too, was gone. It became part of what the mind would label silence. You were now subsumed into the superorganism. The
Abraham Verghese
#70. I realized if something happens to him, it happens to me, too. If I love myself, I love him, for we are one. That makes it a risk worth taking for me - it wouldn't be for anyone else, unless they loved him.
Abraham Verghese
#71. 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 ...
Abraham Verghese
#74. You see, young Dr. Marion, that's what makes us human. We always want more.
Abraham Verghese
#75. Don't Let Him Know is a rich, evocative and brilliantly told tale of family, of loyalties, and of love that must stay secret. Sandip Roy has broken new ground in this tale of the modern Indian family. A lovely read
Abraham Verghese
#76. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#77. Whatever America needs, the world will supply. Cocaine? Colombia steps to the plate. Shortage of farmworkers, corn detasselers? Thank God for Mexico. Baseball players? Viva Dominica. Need more interns? India, Philippines zindabad!" I
Abraham Verghese
#78. To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.
Abraham Verghese
#79. My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.
Abraham Verghese
#80. By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
Abraham Verghese
#81. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#82. Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
Abraham Verghese
#83. In America, my initial impression was that death or the possibility of it always seemed to come as a surprise, as if we took it for granted that we were immortal, and that death was just an option.
Abraham Verghese
#84. If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
Abraham Verghese
#85. You can't show up at the bedside and then turn on your skills. You have to keep your game sharp all the time.
Abraham Verghese
#86. Yesterday misspent can't be recall'd
Vanity makes beauty contemptible
Wisdom is more valuable than riches.
Abraham Verghese
#87. Men like him became stubborn with opposition, because their convictions were all they had.
Abraham Verghese
#88. No money, no church service, no eulogy,no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit. p 354
Abraham Verghese
#89. 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. Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care ... it is another story altogether.
Abraham Verghese
#90. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#91. [American ambulance crews] salvaged people we'd never see in Missing, because no one would have tied to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here.
Abraham Verghese
#93. Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
Abraham Verghese
#94. What we are fighting isn't godlessness
this is the most godly country on earth. We aren't even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines ... that helps. When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.
Abraham Verghese
#95. Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted
Abraham Verghese
#96. What a bad idea it had been to give the Bible to anyone but priests, Ghosh thought. It made a preacher out of everybody.
Abraham Verghese
#97. The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
Abraham Verghese
#99. In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we 'battle' cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation. If we are fortunate, we 'beat' the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having 'succumbed after a long battle.'
Abraham Verghese
#100. 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 Verghese
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
