Top 100 Verghese Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. In all my years here, no one's been able to remember my name when I'm introduced. No one has bothered. They usually see us as types, not as individuals. His
Abraham Verghese
#4. Impending death had a way of unexpectedly unearthing the past so that it came together with the present in an unholy coupling.
Abraham Verghese
#5. I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and but for their services, I'm not sure how exactly we could manage.
Abraham Verghese
#6. If the situation demanded autocracy, I gave it autocracy.
Verghese Kurien
#7. Telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology.
Abraham Verghese
#8. In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
Abraham Verghese
#9. We're now able to show that the words of comfort trigger biological reactions which are the very things that you want, and you can use drugs to get there, or you can use words of comfort to get there, which would make your drugs so much more effective.
Abraham Verghese
#10. 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
#11. B.C. sat back in his chair. 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 Dominicana. Need more interns? India, Philippines zindabad
Abraham Verghese
#12. When he recalls it in later years, he will wonder if he is distorting it, embellishing it, because each time he consciously recalls her, that forms a new memory, a new imprint to be stacked on top of the previous one. He fears that too much handling will make it crumble.
Abraham Verghese
#13. She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life ... As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.
Abraham Verghese
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
Abraham Verghese
#18. 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
#19. ...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
#20. And there will be no more interruptions and you will be staying for dessert, coffee, and cigars.
Abraham Verghese
#21. 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
#22. She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
Abraham Verghese
#23. In working myself ragged, I felt integrated, I felt American, and I rarely had time to think of home.
Abraham Verghese
#24. 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
#25. I welcomed my slavish existence as a surgical resident, the never-ending work, the cries that kept me in the present, the immersion in blood, pus, and tears
the fluids in which one dissolved all traces of self. In working myself ragged, I felt integrated ...
Abraham Verghese
#26. Just as she kept her thoughts to herself, I was learning to do the same. This was what growing up was about: HIDE the corpse, DON'T bare your heart, DO make assumptions about the motives of others.
Abraham Verghese
#27. 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
#28. Do the right thing, put up with unfairness, selfishness, stay true to yourself ... one day it all works out.
Abraham Verghese
#29. 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
#30. I'd become aware of human complexity
that's a kinder word than deceit.
Abraham Verghese
#31. 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
#32. How we treat the least of our brethren, how we treat the peasant suffering with volvulus, that's the measure of this country. Not our fighter planes or tanks,
Abraham Verghese
#33. 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
#34. Modern society has evolved to the point where we counter the old-fashioned fatalism surrounding the word 'cancer' by embracing the idea of the Uber-mind - that our will possesses nearly supernatural powers.
Abraham Verghese
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. The master-word is Work, a little one, as I have said, but fraught with momentous sequences if you can but write it on the tablets of your hearts, and bind it upon your foreheads.
Abraham Verghese
#39. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#41. We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
Abraham Verghese
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. I am forced to render some order to the events of my life, to say it began here, and then because of this, that happened, and this is how the end connects to the beginning, and so here I am.
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. His motivation was to rattle the good people of Greenwich mean time, have them raise their heads from their tea and scones, and say, Oh, yes. Africa. For a fleeting moment they'd have the same awareness of us that we had of them.
Abraham Verghese
#47. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#48. 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
#49. There wasn't any point in dwelling in the pain of the past, not when the future could hold suck pleasure.
Abraham Verghese
#50. All possibilities resided within me, and they required me to be here. If I left, what would be left of me?
Abraham Verghese
#51. How beautiful and horrible life is, Hema thought; too horrible to simply call tragic. Life is worse than tragic. p 108
Abraham Verghese
#52. A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.
Abraham Verghese
#53. My desire to be a physician had a lot to do with that sense of medicine as a ministry of healing, not just a science. And not even just a science and an art, but also a calling, also a ministry.
Abraham Verghese
#55. 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
#56. The fact that people were attentive to his body does not compensate for their ignoring his being.
Abraham Verghese
#57. Tizitash zeweter wode ene eye metah. I can't help thinking about you.
Abraham Verghese
#58. 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
#60. The trajectory of her scholastic progress to that point was spectacular and unprecedented, a model for all youth; it was also an invitation to fate to stick out a foot and trip her.
Abraham Verghese
#61. 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
#62. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#67. When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
Abraham Verghese
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. 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.
Abraham Verghese
#71. Doubt is a first cousin to faith, Ghosh. To have faith, you have to suspend your disbelief.
Abraham Verghese
#72. a person who does not have respect for time, and does not have a sense of timing, can achieve little.
Verghese Kurien
#73. 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
#74. I joke, but only half joke, that if you show up in an American hospital missing a finger, no one will believe you until they get a CAT scan, MRI and orthopedic consult.
Abraham Verghese
#75. 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
Abraham Verghese
#76. Any sensible government must learn to unleash the energy of its people and get them to perform instead of trying to get a bureaucracy to perform.
Verghese Kurien
#77. And as for my father? No, he wouldn't ever walk through those gates; I now knew that. Whatever Thomas Stone had, wherever he was at this moment, he had no idea what he'd given up in the exchange.
Abraham Verghese
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. You must always remember that you are Kurien's second wife. His first wife is the dairy. Don't ever forget that and don't make yourself miserable by being jealous. And never, never try to snatch your husband away from his first wife.
Verghese Kurien
#81. 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
#82. I knew what I'd say to him: You're much too late. We went ahead with our lives without you.
Abraham Verghese
#83. Medicine may be the lens through which I see the world, but since I think of medicine as 'life +', a place where life is exaggerated and seen at its most vital and poignant, I'll be writing about life more than I will be writing about medicine.
Abraham Verghese
#84. You had to exert yourself to see this world. But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity, if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and if you went through that door, a strange thing happened: you left your petty troubles on the threshold. It could be addictive
Abraham Verghese
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. We Indians are an extremely intelligent people but we can progress as a nation only when we learn the secret of unleashing this positive power of the people. Whenever this happens it disturbs a lot of people - because they know that a giant is waking up.
Verghese Kurien
#88. I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.
Abraham Verghese
#89. The poorest in America are the sickets. Poor people can't afford preventive care or insurance. The poor don't see doctors. They show up at our doorstep when things are advanced.
Abraham Verghese
#90. She found her greatness, at last, found it in her suffering. Once you have greatness, who needs anything else?
Abraham Verghese
#91. 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
#92. The ambulance crews brought the victims to us before the tires on the wreck stopped spinning. They salvaged people we'd never see in Missing, because no one would have tried to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here. A
Abraham Verghese
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#98. 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
#99. I began to see then that when the government enters business, the citizens of India get cheated. The greatest repercussion of the government entering into business is that instead of safeguarding people from vested interests, they themselves become the vested interest.
Verghese Kurien
#100. 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
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