Top 300 Abraham Verghese Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

254. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

268. “Remember, God didn’t speak just to Isaiah, but to everyone, when he said, ‘Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?’ Isaiah said, ‘Here I am. Send me!”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

270. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

272. “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

273. “You can’t set out to achieve your goals without a little madness.”

— Abraham Verghese

274. “His art, so he tells himself, is to give voice to the ordinary, in memorable ways.”

— Abraham Verghese

275. “I don’t think you can be a physician and not see yourself reflected in your patient’s illness.”

— Abraham Verghese

276. “Philipose, face upturned to the heavens, screams, beseeches his God, any god. God is silent. Rain is the best that heaven can do.”

— Abraham Verghese

277. “A shaft of light from the window falls onto the paper. Has it been there all this time? Dust motes twirl inside like acrobats in a spotlight, freed from gravity, a sight so beautiful he feels a catch in his chest.”

— Abraham Verghese

278. “Every family has secrets, but not all secrets are meant to deceive.”

— Abraham Verghese

279. “In a life, it is the in-betweens that are fatal;.”

— Abraham Verghese

280. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

282. “If two people at the very same moment hold visions of each other, perhaps atoms coalesce into invisible forms, like radio waves, and connect them.”

— Abraham Verghese

283. “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

284. “The rain never holds anyone back. Her umbrella becomes a halo that goes wherever she goes outdoors, while her bare feet happily slosh through puddles.”

— Abraham Verghese

285. “Now and then Ghosh would grin and wink at me across the room. He was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.”

— Abraham Verghese

286. “How is a dream that involves two people to be sustained by one?”

— Abraham Verghese

287. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

289. “Some part of him must know this is unreasonable even as he thinks it. But his mind can’t accept the alternative. If it’s all his fault, what earthly excuse does he have be still breathing?”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

291. “He knew a simple truth: there was never anything healing one could say. One could only be. The best friends in such times were those who had no agenda other than to be present, to offer themselves, as Franz and Lena had done for him.”

— Abraham Verghese

292. “For a few seconds, before he became fully conscious, he still had a father. Then it all came back to him.”

— Abraham Verghese

293. “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

294. “Why was it one had to leave something, or have it taken away, to really appreciate it? But tonight, she’s the storyteller, because he’s hungry to hear every detail of her medical world, bringing his curiosity like a moth to anything that shines of new knowledge.”

— Abraham Verghese

295. “What can one do but go on? She miscarries again. When she recovers, she looks to cast blame: might this be the doing of the spirit in the cellar? Could it be that spiteful? She descends to the cellar and sits on an empty urn, sniffing the air, taking her soundings. To her surprise she feels the spirit commiserate with her. She comes away mollified.”

— Abraham Verghese

296. “He memorizes her silhouette: the brow, the nose, the ramp of her upper lip with its Cupid’s bow giving way to the vermilion border of the lower lip, then gliding over her thyroid cartilage, her cricoid, to the tender hollow above her breastbone. He’d like to trace the contour with his finger.”

— Abraham Verghese

297. “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

298. “The pain of a world in which his father didn’t exist was unbearable.”

— Abraham Verghese

299. “When they turn in, he says, “It must be so hard to see such suffering every day.” He shudders. “I couldn’t do it. Only luck and the grace of God keeps us free of such afflictions. We’re so blessed, aren’t we?”

— Abraham Verghese

300. “We have no practice, he thinks, of seeing our real selves. Even before a mirror we compose our faces to meet our own expectations.”

— Abraham Verghese