Top 280 Abraham Verghese Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “When you win, you often lose, that’s just a fact.”

— Abraham Verghese

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

109. “You” or “Your” never meant one of us. When we replied to a question, no one cared which of us had spoken; an answer from one was an answer for The Twins.”

— Abraham Verghese

110. “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

111. “Yesterday misspent can’t be recall’d.”

— Abraham Verghese

112. “It was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.”

— Abraham Verghese

113. “Flatus, Fluid, Feces, Foreign Body, and Fetus feel better out than in,” he said aloud, as if he’d just invented the phrase. In his book he had called it the Five-F rule.”

— Abraham Verghese

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “Ghosh trusted me to do whatever it is I would choose to do. That, too, is love. He’d been dead more than a quarter century and he was still teaching me about the trust that comes only from true love.”

— Abraham Verghese

120. “What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?”

— Abraham Verghese

121. “Faith is to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible.”

— Abraham Verghese

122. “Thou shall not operate on the day of a patient’s death.”

— Abraham Verghese

123. “Medicine is a demanding mistress, yet she is faithful, generous, and true, She gives me the privilege of seeing patients and of teaching students at the bedside, and thereby she gives meaning to everything I do.”

— Abraham Verghese

124. “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 them 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

125. “She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life... As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.”

— Abraham Verghese

126. “The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.”

— Abraham Verghese

127. “Easiest thing in the world is to love a dying man.”

— Abraham Verghese

128. “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

129. “Or to think that before Pasteur’s discovery of microbes, doctors fought duels over the merits of balsam of Peru vs. tar oil for wound infection. Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion. Still, each generation of physicians imagined that ignorance was the special provenance of their elders.”

— Abraham Verghese

130. “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 a flea that lived on the bodies of men.”

— Abraham Verghese

131. “Hands are a manifestation of the divine.”

— Abraham Verghese

132. “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

133. “You live it forward, but understand it backward.”

— Abraham Verghese

134. “Men like him became stubborn with opposition, because their convictions were all they had.”

— Abraham Verghese

135. “The poorest in America are the sickets. Poor people can’t afford preventive care or insurance. The poor don’t see doctors. They show up at our doorstep when things are advanced.”

— Abraham Verghese

136. “Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.”

— Abraham Verghese

137. “Owen and Jennifer Tuttleberry are Anglo-Indian friends of Honorine’s, and now of Digby’s – Jennifer works as a switchboard operator, while her husband is a locomotive driver. Owen spends his days standing on the footplate of Bessie, his great hissing “dame,” her plethora of dials and levers before him, a little boy whose dream has come true.”

— Abraham Verghese

138. “A man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world...”

— Abraham Verghese

139. “An admonishment of sorts, the gentle warning of one who arrived on an earlier ship: You there! Listen! Independence and resilience. This is what the new immigrant needs. Don’t get fooled by all this activity. Don’t invoke the superorganism. No, no. One functions alone in America. Begin now.”

— Abraham Verghese

140. “I remembered... how the dust motes dancing in the morning rays formed their own galaxy. When I was a child, that sight had hinted at the wonderful and frightening complexity of the university, of how the closer one looked the more one saw revealed, and on’es imagination was the only limit.”

— Abraham Verghese

141. “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

142. “He cringed when I said those words. No wonder he was reluctant to probe my past. No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen.”

— Abraham Verghese

143. “It should be a basic human right.”

— Abraham Verghese

144. “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.”

— Abraham Verghese

145. “In a life, it is the in-betweens that are fatal. It is the indecisiveness that killed his son.”

— Abraham Verghese

146. “But then my poor sons would have to be educated alongside Anglo-Indians. They’d have a chee-chee accent like their mother and be called ‘fifteen annas’ behind their backs, even if they were not Anglo-Indians.” There were sixteen annas to a rupee, and to be a Celeste was to be one short.”

— Abraham Verghese

147. “The land of milk and honey, Ghosh thought. Milk and honey, and love for money. Now.”

— Abraham Verghese

148. “Sisters of the Nigrizia.”

— Abraham Verghese

149. “We have more English Bibles than there are English-speaking people in the entire country.” Matron had turned from the window and followed his gaze. “Polish Bibles, Czech Bibles, Italian Bibles, French Bibles, Swedish Bibles. I think some are from your Sunday-school children. We need medicine and food. But we get Bibles.” Matron smiled. “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

150. “One operates in the now.”

— Abraham Verghese