Top 280 Abraham Verghese Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “But then my poor sons would have to be educated alongside Anglo-Indians. They’d have a chee-chee accent like their mother and be called ‘fifteen annas’ behind their backs, even if they were not Anglo-Indians.” There were sixteen annas to a rupee, and to be a Celeste was to be one short.”

— Abraham Verghese

213. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

216. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

226. “Please understand. This happened before her birth. She was born this way. Nothing you or anyone else did caused it. Understand? This isn’t your fault. In Jeremiah, doesn’t God say, ‘Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee’?” “He does!” she says, shocked to hear a Bible verse from this worldly man.”

— Abraham Verghese

227. “A chasm separates that memory from this moment.”

— Abraham Verghese

228. “Rune compounds a tincture of opium, arrack, lemon, and sugar into an apothecary bottle and heads back.”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

230. “She will pray, too, but mostly she’ll try to hold on to this feeling of stillness. Whether God has spoken or has yet to speak, she’s at peace.”

— Abraham Verghese

231. “In my hands.” “Good answer! The best possible operation is not the same as the best operation possible!”

— Abraham Verghese

232. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

234. “Even before his brain digests these sights, his body – skin, nerve endings, lungs, heart – recognizes the geography of his birth. He never understood how much it mattered. Every bit of this lush landscape is his; its every atom contains him.”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

236. “Success is you are fully loving what you are doing. That only is success!”

— Abraham Verghese

237. “Mary and Jeb were an item from the time they were both in knickers. Even gave her a ring. Then this month my brother ditches her just like that. I’m still mad.”

— Abraham Verghese

238. “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.”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

240. “But I learned that ignorance is never revealed if one holds one’s tongue. To speak is what removes all doubts.”

— Abraham Verghese

241. “Sooner or later, she must sit down to the meal of consequences.”

— Abraham Verghese

242. “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

243. “I have no choice, which is the best kind of choice.”

— Abraham Verghese

244. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

246. “Apparently, Marx said that religion was the opium of the masses. It kept the oppressed from complaining or trying to change things.”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

248. “Gallimaufry of.”

— Abraham Verghese

249. “You monkey, you, I wanted to say, and I reached hungrily for his hand, our fingers interlocking. You should laugh more, it suits you: see how the furrows around your brow vanish and your ears ease back?”

— Abraham Verghese

250. “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