Abraham Verghese quotes

Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny. (Abraham Verghese)
Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted. View quote
Abraham Verghese
No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son. View quote
Abraham Verghese
Make something beautiful of your life. View quote
Abraham Verghese
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. View quote
Abraham Verghese
The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not. View quote
Abraham Verghese
To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive. View quote
Abraham Verghese
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. View quote
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. View quote
Abraham Verghese
Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion. View quote
Abraham Verghese
Geography is destiny. (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. View quote
Abraham Verghese
Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals. View quote
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. View quote
Abraham Verghese
The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It's like a cancer that's metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why? View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Abraham Verghese
... guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action. View quote
Abraham Verghese
He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live. View quote
Abraham Verghese
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... View quote
Abraham Verghese
I'm a great believer in geography being destiny. (Abraham Verghese)
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.' View quote
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. View quote
Abraham Verghese
What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it. The process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialised language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism. View quote
Abraham Verghese
Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom. View quote
Abraham Verghese