Abraham Verghese Quotes - Page 2

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• 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

  Baptism, President, Use

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Beautiful, Imagination, Alive

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Hurt, Feelings

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• 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

  Cancer, Taken, Knives

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• Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?"... "Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223"... "And pray, why would this number interest us?" "It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, 'One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes'.

  Abraham Verghese

  Zero, Two, Numbers

  86 Copy quote

• 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.

  Abraham Verghese

  Climbing, Escaping, House

  6 Copy quote

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

  Abraham Verghese

  Omission, World, Action

  "Cutting for Stone". Book by Abraham Verghese, 2009.

  9 Copy quote

• There are moments as a teacher when I'm conscious that I'm trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago. It's an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.

  Abraham Verghese

  Teacher, Years, Eerie

  4 Copy quote

• Make something beautiful of your life.

  Abraham Verghese

  Beautiful, Something Beautiful

  6 Copy quote

• According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn't speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did. Still, it's an apt metaphor for our profession. But there's another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

  Abraham Verghese

  Broken, Tasks, Generations

  122 Copy quote

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

  Abraham Verghese

  Physicians, Reform, Care

  4 Copy quote

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

  Abraham Verghese

  Self Confidence, Seductive, Firsts

  13 Copy quote

• The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. Its like a cancer thats metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?

  Abraham Verghese

  Suicide, Cancer, People

  4 Copy quote

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

  Abraham Verghese

  Ignorance, Proportion, Grew

  Abraham Verghese (2012). “Cutting for Stone”, p.86, Random House India

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Judging, Suffering

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Technology, Feelings, Physicians

  4 Copy quote

• Being the first born gives you great patience.

  Abraham Verghese

  Giving, Firsts, Born

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Looks, Wheels, Caught

  8 Copy quote

• What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?

  Abraham Verghese

  Ears, Emergencies, Treatment

  Abraham Verghese (2012). “Cutting for Stone”, p.304, Random House India

  7 Copy quote

• How we treat the least of our brethren,... that's the measure of this country.

  Abraham Verghese

  Country, Treats, Brethren

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• 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.

  Abraham Verghese

  Lucky, Purpose, Common

  Abraham Verghese (2012). “Cutting for Stone”, p.10, Random House India

  10 Copy quote

• When I use the word 'healing', by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we're very good at handling, but there's always a sense of the violation. 'Why me?' 'Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else's?' And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.

  Abraham Verghese

  Spiritual, Jobs, Mean

  "A Novel That's the Best Medicine". Interview with Tina Brown, www.thedailybeast.com. February 11, 2009.

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

  Abraham Verghese

  Guilt, Action, Righteous

  Abraham Verghese (2012). “Cutting for Stone”, p.139, Random House India

  4 Copy quote

• There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, 'You must read this.' I've always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America, a discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.

  Abraham Verghese

  Meaningful, Book, Writing

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Country, Thinking, Men

  4 Copy quote

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