Abraham Verghese Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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“Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Home #Definitions #Where You Are
“Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.”
-- Abraham Verghese
“You live it forward, but understand it backward.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Life #Inspire
“There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Grief #Results #Capacity
“Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Looks #Wheels #Caught
“We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Lucky #Purpose #Common
“Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?"... "Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223"... "And pray, why would this number interest us?" "It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, 'One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes'.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Zero #Two #Numbers
“The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Motivation #Inspiration #Hands
“What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Ears #Emergencies #Treatment
“No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Heart #Son #Parent
“We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Average #Physicians #Patient
“We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot. I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn't to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. but it can also deepen the wound.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Believe #Doctors #Entering
“Patients know in a heartbeat if they're getting a clumsy exam.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Patient #Exam #Heartbeat
“Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Baptism #President #Use
“The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. Its like a cancer thats metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Suicide #Cancer #People
“I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Heart #Thinking #Medicine
“The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Snakes #Slides #Enough
“That's the funny thing about America--the blessed thing. 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.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Thank You #Blessed #Angel
“Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Math #Numbers #Praying
“Geography is destiny.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Destiny #Geography
“You are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can can play the 'Gloria'? No, not Bach's 'Gloria.' Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Son #Play #Three
“Yesterday misspent can't be recall'd Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Vanity #Yesterday #Riches
“We're losing a ritual. We're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Motivation #Believe #Inspiration
“No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you. And, oh yes, if you wanted, he would give you a haircut and pull your tooth while he was at it.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Giving #Teeth #Matter
“I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don't postpone your dreams.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Dream #People #Feelings
“I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Shows #Love To Read #Willing
“In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Emergencies #Comfort #Ears
“What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it - the process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialized language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#School #Sight #Empathy
“I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net. Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care ... it is another story altogether.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Blessed #Thinking #America
“The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.”
-- Abraham Verghese

#Physicians #Reform #Care

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