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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “Sisters of the Nigrizia.”

— Abraham Verghese

155. “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

156. “One operates in the now.”

— Abraham Verghese

157. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

162. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

169. “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

170. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

175. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

177. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

179. “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

180. “Patience be damned. Let them suffer their distorted worldview. Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole.”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “On his convex forehead his namam is a vertical, three-pronged fork, the center stripe red and the flanking two white. It signals he’s a Vaishnavite, holding Vishnu to be the supreme god in the pantheon.”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

187. “People change, you know. When you leave your country, you are like a plant taken out of soil. Some people turn hard, they can’t flower again.”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

189. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

191. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

193. “Mariamma, sometimes when you are most afraid, when you feel most helpless, that is when God is pointing out a path for you.”

— Abraham Verghese

194. “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

195. “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

196. “Then his voice lost its ebullience; he spoke in a manner in which pretense had fallen off like leaves after a frost.”

— Abraham Verghese

197. “All water is connected and only land and people are discontinuous. And.”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese