Top 280 Abraham Verghese Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

258. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

273. “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

274. “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

275. “As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others. I’ve had my share of angels. Popsy was one of those.” Popsy made Deepak Chief Resident overnight, but with the proviso that he be Chief Resident for two years.”

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

284. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

286. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

288. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

291. “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

292. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese