Top 300 Abraham Verghese Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “They call out to a toddy tapper aloft in a palm tree, who gives them final directions.”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

216. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

220. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “Gallimaufry of.”

— Abraham Verghese

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

235. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

241. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

244. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

246. “God only knows why miscarriages happen. God only knows – but doesn’t choose to explain.”

— Abraham Verghese

247. “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

248. “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

249. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese