Top 280 Abraham Verghese Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

218. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

220. “She listens. She knows he has heard her. Because, as was always his way, he expresses his love for her the only way he knows how: through his silence.”

— Abraham Verghese

221. “Child, the past is past, and furthermore it’s different every time I remember it.”

— Abraham Verghese

222. “Gallimaufry of.”

— Abraham Verghese

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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. “But for a four-year-old, everything is sacred and ordinary.”

— Abraham Verghese

230. “The days that follow feel awkward. But silence still feels better than confessing. Besides, how does one rationally explain irrational fears? He.”

— Abraham Verghese

231. “But God’s time isn’t the same as hers. God’s calendar isn’t the one hanging in her kitchen. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. It’s pointless chastising herself for not rescuing her mother sooner. Happened is happened, she thinks. The past is unreliable, and only the future is certain, and she must look to it with faith that the pattern will be revealed.”

— Abraham Verghese

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

238. “The valley below, the rock underfoot, and the mountain before him will outlast him. On the scale of this land, he is nothing; words like “shame” and “guilt” mean little here; and a reputation is no more than a fleeting blue flame, an evanescent spirit in a brandy glass.”

— Abraham Verghese

239. “The chaos and hurt in God’s world are unfathomable mysteries, yet the Bible shows her that there is order beneath. As her father would say, “Faith is to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible.”

— Abraham Verghese

240. “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

241. “As Philipose recalls this conversation of almost a decade ago, he’s humbled to think that Joppan had been right: only a few years later, the Party won the majority of the seats in Kerala and formed the first democratically elected Communist government anywhere in the world.”

— Abraham Verghese

242. “All water is connected and only land and people are discontinuous. And his land is a place where he can no longer stay.”

— Abraham Verghese

243. “The croup following measles, on top of malnutrition, on top of rickets,” he said to me under his breath. “It’s the cascade of catastrophies.”

— Abraham Verghese

244. “Well, Koshy Saar may not believe in God, but it’s a good thing that God believes in that old man. Why else did he send him into your life?”

— Abraham Verghese

245. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

247. “The universe is nothing but a speck of foam on a limitless ocean that is the Creator.”

— Abraham Verghese

248. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

250. “Digby is struck by the contrast: an enclave for Anglo-Indians that excludes natives, yet whose inhabitants are themselves excluded by the ruling race with whom they align. But then, he’s in the same spot. Digby Kilgour: oppressed in Glasgow; oppressor here. The thought depresses him.”

— Abraham Verghese