Top 280 Abraham Verghese Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Big Ammachi scans the darkened walls. Long ago this stopped being a kitchen, becoming instead sacred space, a faithful companion that cosseted her with its warm, scented embrace.”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

203. “The moment he jumped clear of the dugout, the moment his feet touched solid ground, he knew he’d cheated death. But he hadn’t felt safe till this moment of seeing Parambil. He’d always imagined that as an adult he’d live in a bustling city far away from here, a place full of life. Only now has he grasped just how vital Parambil is to him, as necessary as his heart or his lungs. One leaves home at one’s own peril.”

— Abraham Verghese

204. “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

205. “As if my past life was revealed to be a waste, a gesture in slow motion, because what I considered scarce and precious was in fact plentiful and cheap, and what I counted as rapid progress turned out to be glacially slow. The.”

— Abraham Verghese

206. “Forgive me,” she says now. “For what?” “For everything. Sometimes we can wound each other in ways we don’t intend.”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

208. “Luther did not believe that HIV was killing him. He believed that our inability to treat the symptoms that bothered him, our prescribing the wrong medications, was at the root of his problem. I almost believed him: Maybe if we could put together the right concoctions we could give him ten good years.”

— Abraham Verghese

209. “In all my years here, no one’s been able to remember my name when I’m introduced. No one has bothered. They usually see us as types, not as individuals.” His.”

— Abraham Verghese

210. “During the inquiry she had tapped into the righteousness that was her due. She slapped down the least suggestion that she might be at fault. She had learned a lesson. To show weakness. To be tearful or shattered didn’t serve her. One shouldn’t just hope to be treated well, one must insist on it.”

— Abraham Verghese

211. “Rune, smiling, reenters the illusion that is the world.”

— Abraham Verghese

212. “The tide had turned, and the worst possible thing had happened: my heroes had become the “bad guys,” and one didn’t dare say otherwise.”

— Abraham Verghese

213. “What is worry but fear of what the future holds? Baby Mol lives completely in the present and is spared all worry.”

— Abraham Verghese

214. “The ‘kind’ slave owners in India, or anywhere, were always the ones who had the greatest difficulty seeing the injustice of slavery. Their kindness, their generosity compared to cruel slave owners, made them blind to the unfairness of a system of slavery that they created, they maintained, and that favored them.”

— Abraham Verghese

215. “Gallimaufry of.”

— Abraham Verghese

216. “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

217. “Big Ammachi asks Baby Mol the question, the one she has asked every night for over a decade now, a question that counts on Baby Mol’s gift of prophecy.”

— Abraham Verghese

218. “All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them. I tried. 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!”

— Abraham Verghese

219. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

221. “Philipose quotes Gandhi: “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of food.”

— Abraham Verghese

222. “Reading is the door to knowledge. Knowledge raises the yield of paddy. Knowledge combats poverty. Knowledge saves lives.”

— Abraham Verghese

223. “Sometimes, if you think you’re sick, you will be.”

— Abraham Verghese

224. “The price of deceit is to feel like a cockroach.”

— Abraham Verghese

225. “But there’s always something, Lord, isn’t there? Every year there’s a new worry. I’m not complaining! It’s just that I imagined there’d come a time when I wouldn’t have anything more to worry about.”

— Abraham Verghese

226. “Big Ammachi was shocked to see how thin she had become, her hair suddenly white at the temples; it was such a troubling sight in one so young.”

— Abraham Verghese

227. “Being a doctor means he has no objectivity about his symptoms.”

— Abraham Verghese

228. “The God who never interferes with drownings or train wrecks likes to peer in on the human experiment at such moments of reckoning, touching the scene with a little celestial light.”

— Abraham Verghese

229. “By watching the probationers, she’s learned how to change soiled sheets under a bedridden patient, how to turn him, and give him a proper bed bath. It’s humbling. Shouldn’t every physician learn this? Isn’t this what medicine is really about?”

— Abraham Verghese

230. “My father had so much love for Ninan, and so much love for my mother. But he never got the chance to love them for as long as he wanted. He poured all that love into me, more love than most daughters experience in many lifetimes.”

— Abraham Verghese

231. “Without love of their subject, they’d just be cutting stone; their adoration is what brings it to life.”

— Abraham Verghese

232. “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

233. “Literacy alters patterns of life that have gone undisturbed for generations.”

— Abraham Verghese

234. “Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I’ve lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school.”

— Abraham Verghese

235. “These everyday, unremarkable noises of her youth are now, with the passing of her cherished loved ones, an ode to memory, bearing the past into the present. It is the hour for gracious ghosts.”

— Abraham Verghese

236. “What did it matter? We are dying while we are living. We are old even when we’re young. We are clinging to life even as we resign ourselves to leaving it.”

— Abraham Verghese

237. “All water is connected, and her world is limitless. He stands at the limits of his.”

— Abraham Verghese

238. “The whisky burns. How strange to try to drown pain with fire.”

— Abraham Verghese

239. “Odat Kochamma is the tonic Parambil needs. The old lady is ceaseless in her toil. Within a week, Big Ammachi comes to rely on being fussed at, told to sit down and rest, or made to laugh so hard she has to pee.”

— Abraham Verghese

240. “The word “lazaretto” used to refer to a quarantine station where infectious patients could be isolated, but over time it came to mean a leprosy hospital.”

— Abraham Verghese

241. “This is, after all, his own nightmare, though in his dream the culprit is always leprosy. He is overcome. He takes a deep breath. The journey the two of them embark on together must begin with love, Rune thinks. To love the sick – isn’t that always the first step?”

— Abraham Verghese

242. “The price of deceit is to feel like a cockroach. She listens as he recounts the newspaper stories of the raids, and of Arikkad’s death while trying to escape. “The Naxalite.”

— Abraham Verghese

243. “God’s time isn’t the same as hers. God’s calendar isn’t the one hanging in her kitchen.”

— Abraham Verghese

244. “Flattery isn’t the right word for his portrait. It’s empathy – the same quality in the sculptures that surround them. The ancient artists were devotees above all else. Without love of their subject, they’d just be cutting stone; their adoration is what brings it to life.”

— Abraham Verghese

245. “The Arabs had the dry, musty smell of a grain cellar; the Asians contributed the ginger and garlic; and from the whites came the odor of a milk-soaked bib.”

— Abraham Verghese

246. “What can success look like now? Janakiram has the answer. “Success is not money! Success is you are fully loving what you are doing. That only is success!”

— Abraham Verghese

247. “He thinks of his loving sister, and the narrow, confined life she lived that never seemed that way to her, and how much she enriched their lives. He was her “precious baby,” never aging for her, just as she never aged. Strangers might feel sorry for Baby Mol, but if they’d understood how happy she was, how fully she lived in the present, inhabiting each second, they’d have been envious.”

— Abraham Verghese

248. “He alone amongst all the people she knows uses his two ears and one mouth in that exact proportion. She loves him in a way she.”

— Abraham Verghese

249. “The Model T’s loose suspension makes them sway in unison, a rhythm conducive to confession.”

— Abraham Verghese

250. “The city was at once dead and yet in continuous motion, like a blanket of maggots animating a rotting corpse.”

— Abraham Verghese