Top 280 Abraham Verghese Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

114. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

124. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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, or how big the Emperor’s palace happens to be.”

— Abraham Verghese

141. “The master-word is Work, a little one, as I have said, but fraught with momentous sequences if you can but write it on the tablets of your hearts, and bind it upon your foreheads.”

— Abraham Verghese

142. “Sisters of the Nigrizia.”

— Abraham Verghese

143. “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

144. “One operates in the now.”

— Abraham Verghese

145. “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

146. “To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

148. “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

149. “Just as the English missionaries discovered when they came to India, there was no better way to carry Christ’s love than through stupes and poultices, liniments and dressings, cleansing and comfort.”

— Abraham Verghese

150. “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