Top 280 Abraham Verghese Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I am convinced that one can buy in Harrods of London a kit that allows an enterprising Englishman to create a British school anywhere in the third world. It comes with black robes, preprinted report cards for Michaelmas, Lent, and Easter terms, as well as hymnals, Prefect Badges, and a syllabus. Assembly required.”

— Abraham Verghese

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.”

— Abraham Verghese

57. “What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”

— Abraham Verghese

58. “When she walked away I felt the weight of what she left unsaid. I wanted to call after her, Ma! You have it all wrong. But 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. They’re certainly doing all these things to you. I.”

— Abraham Verghese

59. “He had become my poster boy, a walking testament to how will and belief can make up for lack of muscle, how anger can overcome blindness.”

— Abraham Verghese

60. “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

61. “No one but “Jigiby Doctor,” who gave her the miraculous drops, may operate.”

— Abraham Verghese

62. “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

63. “Jeremiah 17 it is written, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure, and who can understand it?”

— Abraham Verghese

64. “Doubt is a first cousin to faith, Ghosh. To have faith, you have to suspend your disbelief.”

— Abraham Verghese

65. “As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled. She was ashamed that such a simple insight should have eluded her all these years. Make something beautiful of your life.”

— Abraham Verghese

66. “Screw your courage to the sticking place.” – Lady MacBeth.”

— Abraham Verghese

67. “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

68. “The key to your happiness 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. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”

— Abraham Verghese

69. “This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone. She.”

— Abraham Verghese

70. “I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient 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

71. “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

72. “I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.”

— Abraham Verghese

73. “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

74. “Most of us can’t go back and make restitution. We can’t do a thing about our should haves and our could haves. But a few lucky men like Ghosh never have such worries; there was no restitution he needed to make, no moment he failed to seize.”

— Abraham Verghese

75. “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

76. “Knowledge shall be promoted by frequent exercise Art polishes and improves nature Fortune is a fair but fickle mistrefs Yesterday misspent can’t be recall’d Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.”

— Abraham Verghese

77. “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

78. “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. 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

79. “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

80. “If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.”

— Abraham Verghese

81. “Children were the foot wedged in the closing door, the glimmer of hope that in reincarnation there would be some house to go to, even if one came back as a dog, or a mouse, or flea that lived on the bodies of men. If... there was a raising of the dead, then a child would be sure to see that its parents were awakened.”

— Abraham Verghese

82. “All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them.”

— Abraham Verghese

83. “This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don’t bare your heart, do make assumptions about the motives of others. They’re certainly doing all these things to you.”

— Abraham Verghese

84. “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

85. “Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”

— Abraham Verghese

86. “It was called “Tizita”; there was no single equivalent English word. Tizita meant “memory tinged with regret.” Was there any other kind, Ghosh wondered.”

— Abraham Verghese

87. “In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.”

— Abraham Verghese

88. “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

89. “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 specialized language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism.”

— Abraham Verghese

90. “In working myself ragged, I felt integrated, I felt American, and I rarely had time to think of home.”

— Abraham Verghese

91. “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

92. “Tizitash zeweter wode ene eye metah. I can’t help thinking about you.”

— Abraham Verghese

93. “Life is like that. You live it forward but understand it backward.”

— Abraham Verghese

94. “As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.”

— Abraham Verghese

95. “When you win, you often lose, that’s just a fact.”

— Abraham Verghese

96. “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

97. “One shouldn’t just hope to be treated well: one must insist on it.”

— Abraham Verghese

98. “The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark. William Yeats, “The Choice.”

— Abraham Verghese

99. “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

100. “After just a week in the hospital, I felt I’d left America for another country. My world was a land of fluorescent lights where day and night were the same, and where more than half the citizens spoke Spanish. When they spoke English it wasn’t what I expected in the land of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The bloodlines from the Mayflower hadn’t trickled down to this zip code. Three.”

— Abraham Verghese