Top 280 Abraham Verghese Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “The secret of the care of the patient, she once read, is in caring for the patient, and.”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

154. “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

155. “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

156. “For twenty-eight years of Baby Mol’s life, the sun has never failed to come up, yet every morning she’s ecstatic at its return. To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy.”

— Abraham Verghese

157. “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

158. “Thomas Christian ladies attend his clinic as faithfully as they attend church, presenting him their aches and pains that are often surrogates for chronic marital woes – he offers placebos and sympathetic homilies, such as “Mullu elayil vinallum, ela mullel vinallum, elakka nashttam.” Whether the thorn falls on the leaf, or the leaf falls on the thorn, the leaf suffers. “Aah, aah, you’re so right, doctor. My husband is a thorn only, what to do?”

— Abraham Verghese

159. “I have been bent and broken but I hope into better shape.”

— Abraham Verghese

160. “He’ll never know the bracing sensation of diving headfirst into the river, the roar of entry followed by enveloping silence. All water is connected, and her world is limitless. He stands at the limits.”

— Abraham Verghese

161. “The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do.”

— Abraham Verghese

162. “Koshy Saar’s response is indignant. “It’s fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!”

— Abraham Verghese

163. “Departure or imminent death will force you to define your true tastes.”

— Abraham Verghese

164. “Marion, remember the Eleventh Commandment,” he said. “Thou shall not operate on the day of a patient’s death.”

— Abraham Verghese

165. “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

166. “A good story goes beyond what a forgiving God cares to do: it reconciles families and unburdens them of secrets whose bond is stronger than blood. But in their revealing, as in their keeping, secrets can tear a family apart.”

— Abraham Verghese

167. “When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.” Harris.”

— Abraham Verghese

168. “Leprosy deadens the nerves and is therefore painless; the real wound of leprosy, and the only pain they feel, is that of exile.”

— Abraham Verghese

169. “I am so behind that yesterday catches up with tomorrow.”

— Abraham Verghese

170. “Not hammer-strokes, but dance of the water, sings the pebbles into perfection. – Rabindranath Tagore.”

— Abraham Verghese

171. “Without Genet as a witness, nothing I did was meaningful.”

— Abraham Verghese

172. “There’s no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart – she was thinking of Stone.”

— Abraham Verghese

173. “What she thought was her life is all maya, all illusion, but it is one shared illusion. And what else can she do but go on.”

— Abraham Verghese

174. “And what is time but cumulative loss?”

— Abraham Verghese

175. “By the time they return to the lodge in the late afternoon, they’ve seen so many white men – sa’ippus – and even white women, that Baby Mol no longer wants to touch them to see if the color comes off.”

— Abraham Verghese

176. “His motivation was to rattle the good people of Greenwich mean time, have them raise their heads from their tea and scones, and say, Oh, yes. Africa. For a fleeting moment they’d have the same awareness of us that we had of them.”

— Abraham Verghese

177. “Make your life something beautiful for God.”

— Abraham Verghese

178. “You can’t walk across a lake just because you change its name to “land.” Labels matter.”

— Abraham Verghese

179. “Roses would be annoying weeds if the blooms never withered and died. Beauty resides in the knowledge that it doesn’t last.”

— Abraham Verghese

180. “The ambulance crews brought the victims to us before the tires on the wreck stopped spinning. They salvaged people we’d never see in Missing, because no one would have tried to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here. A.”

— Abraham Verghese

181. “Prison,” I’d heard Ghosh laughingly tell Adid, “is the best thing for a marriage. If you can’t send your spouse, then go yourself. It works wonders.”

— Abraham Verghese

182. “The devotional’s parsimonious scale, melody, and syncopation feel like a part of her. Janaki, her Tamilian ayah who has been with her from the time she was a little girl in Calcutta, would sing it as she brushed Celeste’s hair.”

— Abraham Verghese

183. “We don’t have children to fulfill our dreams.”

— Abraham Verghese

184. “Listening is talking for him; there’s an eloquence to this kind of attentiveness; it’s rare, and yet he’s generous with it. He alone amongst all the people she knows uses his two ears and one mouth in that exact proportion.”

— Abraham Verghese

185. “Whatever is next for me, whatever the story of my life, the roots that must nourish it are here.”

— Abraham Verghese

186. “The bloodlines from the Mayflower hadn’t trickled down to this zip code.”

— Abraham Verghese

187. “A dog lives for you. A cat just lives with you.”

— Abraham Verghese

188. “Mathachen, the tapper, also brews illicit arrack – not the anise-flavored arak of North Africa that Rune knows, but a tasteless distillate that Rune uses as an antiseptic.”

— Abraham Verghese

189. “As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others.”

— Abraham Verghese

190. “A woman with unconventional beauty raises the hope that the viewer might be the only one to see it, that in recognizing and appreciating it, he alone has created her beauty.”

— Abraham Verghese

191. “They call out to a toddy tapper aloft in a palm tree, who gives them final directions.”

— Abraham Verghese

192. “Life comes from God and life is precious precisely because it is brief. God’s gift is time. However much or however little one has of it, it comes from him.”

— Abraham Verghese

193. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” They are far from being all one.”

— Abraham Verghese

194. “Aadariyumo angaadi vaanibham?” Does the goat understand the butcher’s trade?”

— Abraham Verghese

195. “God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by” – her voice broke as she thought of Sister Mary Joseph Praise – “by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”

— Abraham Verghese

196. “A daughter has an open door into a father’s heart.”

— Abraham Verghese

197. “In this upside down world, snarls are smiles, ugly is beautiful, and the crippled outwork the able bodied, but tears are the same.”

— Abraham Verghese

198. “Find your backbone, or be swallowed whole.”

— Abraham Verghese

199. “Of course, you and I have seen countless deaths among the poor. Their only regret surely is being born poor, suffering from birth to death. You know, in the Book of Job, Job says to God, ‘You should’ve taken me straight from the womb to the tomb! Why the in-between part, why life, if it was just to suffer?’ Something like that. For the poor, death is at least the end of suffering.” He laughed as if he liked what.”

— Abraham Verghese

200. “Every tree had its own personality. Their sense of time is different. We think they’re mute, but it’s just that it takes them days to complete a word. You know, Mariamma, in the jungle I understood my failing, my human limitation. It is to be consumed by one fixed idea. Then another. And another. Like walking the straight line. Wanting to be a priest. Then a Naxalite. But in nature, one fixed idea is unnatural. Or rather, the one idea, the only idea is life itself. Just being. Living.”

— Abraham Verghese