Top 280 Abraham Verghese Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals.”

— Abraham Verghese

53. “Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.”

— Abraham Verghese

54. “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 owe them nothing.”

— Abraham Verghese

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.”

— Abraham Verghese

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

64. “The Madras evening breeze has a body to it, its atomic constituents knitted together to create a thing of substance that strokes and cools the skin in the manner of a long, icy drink or a plunge into a mountain spring.”

— Abraham Verghese

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

73. “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

74. “The water she first stepped into minutes ago is long gone and yet it is here, past and present and future inexorably coupled, like time made incarnate. This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone.”

— Abraham Verghese

75. “Secrecy lives in the same rooms as loneliness. His secret and his failing is that after his mother’s betrayal he cannot risk love.”

— Abraham Verghese

76. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

79. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

81. “The mistake, Digby, of choosing to see more in your future mate than the evidence has already suggested.”

— Abraham Verghese

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “Secrecy lives in the same rooms as loneliness.”

— Abraham Verghese

91. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

93. “The silly chemachen had spent minutes observing Damo, till Unni chased him away. Now he’s too busy gawking at Baby Mol to recall why he’s there, until Big Ammachi asks him about the ledger. His childlike eyes turn uncomprehendingly to her. “That thing under your sweaty armpit,” she says, pointing. He hands it over. “What’s wrong with the little one?” he asks solicitously. She jerks up, following his gaze to where Baby Mol sits on her bench, as she does for hours each day, her legs keeping time.”

— Abraham Verghese

94. “Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese