Abraham Verghese Quotes & Sayings

I stepped out to the lawn. I remember the air that night, and how it was so brisk that it could revive the dead. The fragrance of eucalyptus stoking a home fire, the smell of wet grass, of dung fuel, of tobacco, of swamp air, and the perfume of hundreds of roses
this was the scent of Missing. No, it was the scent of a continent. — Abraham Verghese

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

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

Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?" ... I met his gaze and I did not blink. "Words of comfort," I said to my father. — Abraham Verghese

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

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

Envy Is Behind Flattery. — Abraham Verghese

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

My writing flows out of my doctorhood. They are not separate things. They are one. I think the foremost connection between being a doctor and being a writer is the great privilege of having an intimate view of one's fellow humans, the privilege of being there and helping other people at their most vulnerable moments. — Abraham Verghese

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. — Abraham Verghese

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

My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I have the deepest respect, says, "The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do." Knowing when not to operate, knowing when I am in over my head, knowing when to call for the assistance of a surgeon of my father's caliber
that kind of talent, that kind of "brilliance," goes unheralded. — Abraham Verghese

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

As a child I'd longed for Thomas Stone or at least the idea of him. So many mornings I waited for him at the gates of Missing. I saw that vigil now as necessary, a prerequisite for my insides to harden and cure just like the willow of a cricket bat must cure to be ready for a lifetime of knocks. That was the lesson at Missing's gates: the world does not owe you and neither does your father. — Abraham Verghese

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

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

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. — Abraham Verghese

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Abraham Verghese

Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration of the superorganism. It's a sound the new immigrant hears but not for long. By the time I learned to say "6-inch Number 7 on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce," the sound, too, was gone. It became part of the what the mind would label silence. You were subsumed into the superorganism. — Abraham Verghese

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her unhandsome, but beautiful friend of so many years ... — Abraham Verghese

I chose the specialty of surgery because of Matron, that steady presence during my boyhood and adolescence. 'What is the hardest thing you can possibly do?' she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of the first half of my life.
I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap between ambition and expediency. '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'?
'But, Matron, I can't dream of playing Bach ... I couldn't read music.
'No, Marion,' she said her gaze soft ... 'No, not Bach's 'Gloria'. Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you. — Abraham Verghese

I wanted to write down every bit of wisdom he could impart to me. All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them. I tried. Why did it take an illness for me to recognize the value of time with him? 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 time by the shoulders and tell them, "Seize the day! What matters is this moment!" Most of us can't go back and make restitution. We can't do a thing about our should haves and our could haves — Abraham Verghese

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

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

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

amanuensis. A rapt — Abraham Verghese

As a young physician in the mid-'80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease. — Abraham Verghese

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom. — Abraham Verghese

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

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

Your "Gloria" lives within you. — Abraham Verghese

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

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

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

Sisters of the Nigrizia — Abraham Verghese

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

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

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

My beeper, silent till then, went off. In answering its summons, I slipped the yoke back around my neck; indeed, I welcomed my slavish existence as a surgical resident, the never-ending work, the crises that kept me in the present, the immersion in blood, pus, and tears - the fluids in which one dissolved all traces of self. — Abraham Verghese

I realized that I could have done more for him if I had been in his house. I would have pushed morphine--large doses. Morphine disconnects the head from the body, makes the isthmus of a neck vanish and diminishes the awareness of suffering. It is like a magic trick: the head on the pillow, at peace, while the chest toils away. — Abraham Verghese

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

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

So Medicare decided to pay hospitals like ours for internship and
residency training programs, get it? It's a win-win, as they say - the hospital
gets patients cared for by interns and residents around the clock,people like us who live on site, and whose stipend is a bloody fraction of what the hospital would pay full-time physicians. And Medicare delivers health care to the poor. — Abraham Verghese

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

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

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

What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear? — Abraham Verghese

A beautiful literary collection that tells of today's country doctor, somewhat removed from our romantic black-bag image of days gone by, but still fulfilling an essential need in caring for spread-out populations. At times, with today's advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America's cities, but the variety of practices is enormous. The Country Doctor Revisited captures the trials and tribulations of medicine, but also the satisfaction and the extraordinary rewards that come to those who embrace such a practice. — Abraham Verghese

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

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

I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don't postpone your dreams. — Abraham Verghese

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

No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you. And, oh yes, if you wanted, he would give you a haircut and pull your tooth while he was at it. — Abraham Verghese

I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient whose care I am taking over is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it's only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important. — Abraham Verghese

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

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

Being the firstborn gives you great patience. But you reach a point where after trying and trying you say, Patience be damned. Let them suffer their distorted worldview. Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It's a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you know you owe them nothing. — Abraham Verghese

I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn't to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound. I — Abraham Verghese

There's something universal about illness ... Whether you like it, at some level all patients are saying, 'Daddy, Mommy, help me, tell me it's going to be alright.' — Abraham Verghese

happened has happened, be will be — Abraham Verghese

Geography is destiny. — Abraham Verghese

OUr teachers at LT&C had their A levels and the odd teaching certificate. It is astonishing how a black crepe robe worn over a coat or blouse gives a Cockney punter or a Covent Garden flower girl the gravitas of an Oxford don. Accent be damned in Africa, as long as it's foreign and you have the right skin colour. — Abraham Verghese

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

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

This is my life, I thought ... I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil; I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet? — Abraham Verghese

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

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

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

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

I was thinking back to my own childhood in Ethiopia. The church services of our small Christian Indian community were interminable and conducted in an ancient language, Syriac. My parents and the other Indian Christians in Ethiopia knew the liturgy by heart, it was what they had grown up with. And to stand together in an Ethiopian church that they rented, to worship together in a language that could be traced to St. Thomas and to Jerusalem, was an affirmation of who they were, a connection to a corner of India so far away from Africa. — Abraham Verghese

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

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

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

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

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