Top 280 Abraham Verghese Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

254. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

256. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “The voyage of discovery is not about new lands, but having new eyes.”

— Abraham Verghese

264. “His mother’s soul has been dead for years and her body has now followed.”

— Abraham Verghese

265. “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

266. “Yer human! Flawed. Ya’ think you’re alone. You deserve to be forgiven. We all do. I don’t know if you will ever forgive yourself, but you must try. I wanted you to hear that from me.”

— Abraham Verghese

267. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

270. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

291. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese

293. “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

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

— Abraham Verghese