56 Quotes & Sayings By Abraham Verghese

The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny. Abraham Verghese

Being the first born gives you great patience. Abraham Verghese

Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words. Abraham Verghese

Children were the foot wedged in the closing door, the glimmer of hope that in reincarnation there would be some house to go to, even if one came back as a dog, or a mouse, or flea that lived on the bodies of men. If...there was a raising of the dead, then a child would be sure to see that its parents were awakened. Abraham Verghese

A man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world... Abraham Verghese

Everyone needed an obsession. Abraham Verghese

It was a tale well known to children all over Africa: Abu Kassem, a miserly Baghdad merchant, had held on to his battered, much repaired pair of slippers even though they were objects of derision. At last, even he couldn't stomach the sight of them. But his every attempt to get rid of his slippers ended in disaster: when he tossed them out of his window they landed on the head of a pregnant woman who miscarried, and Abu Kassem was thrown in jail; when he dropped them in the canal, the slippers choked off the main drain and caused flooding, and off Abu Kassem went to jail..' One night when Tawfiq finished, another prisoner, a quiet dignified old man, said, 'Abu Kassem might as well build a special room for his slippers. Why try to lose them? He'll never escape.' The old man laughed, and he seemed happy when he said that. That night the old man died in his sleep. We all saw it the same way. the old man was right. The slippers in the story mean that everything you see and do and touch, every seed you sow, or don't sow, becomes part of your destiny.. In order to start to get rid of your slippers, you have to admit they are yours, and if you do, then they will get rid of themselves. Ghosh sighed. 'I hope one day you see this as clearly as I did in Kerchele. The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny. Abraham Verghese

Geography is destiny. Abraham Verghese

I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain. I believe this is how Thomas Stone materialized in my life. If that's not the explanation, then I must invoke a disinterested God who leaves us to our own devices, neither causing nor preventing tornadoes or pestilence, but a God who will now and then stick his thumb on the spinning wheel so that a father who put a continent between himself and his sons should find himself in the same room as one of them. . Abraham Verghese

God will judge us by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace. Abraham Verghese

Doubt is a first cousin to faith, Ghosh. To have faith, you have to suspend your disbelief. Abraham Verghese

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

When he recalls it in later years, he will wonder if he is distorting it, embellishing it, because each time he consciously recalls her, that forms a new memory, a new imprint to be stacked on top of the previous one. He fears that too much handling will make it crumble. Abraham Verghese

... telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology. Abraham Verghese

When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious. Abraham Verghese

Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?".... I met his gaze and I did not blink. "Words of comfort, " I said to my father. Abraham Verghese

My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I have the deepest respect, says, "The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do." Knowing when not to operate, knowing when I am in over my head, knowing when to call for the assistance of a surgeon of my father's caliber--that kind of talent, that kind of "brilliance, " goes unheralded. Abraham Verghese

...a world where a sparrow's fate and that of a man can be decided in the blink of a cat's eye, such is the true measure of time. Abraham Verghese

The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole. Abraham Verghese

Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration of the superorganism. It's a sound the new immigrant hears but not for long. By the time I learned to say "6-inch Number 7 on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce, " the sound, too, was gone. It became part of the what the mind would label silence. You were subsumed into the superorganism. Abraham Verghese

No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son. Abraham Verghese

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

Do they li Abraham Verghese

To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive. Abraham Verghese

It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory." p 380 Abraham Verghese

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

Years later, when Idi Amin said and did outrageous things, I understood that his motivation was to rattle the good people of Greenwich mean time, have them raise their heads from their tea and scones, and say, Oh yes. Africa. For a fleeting moment they'd have the same awareness of us that we had of them. Abraham Verghese

Life is full of signs. The trick is to know how to read them. Ghosh called this heuristics, a method for solving a problem for which no formula exists. Abraham Verghese

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not. Abraham Verghese

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 play the 'Gloria'? Abraham Verghese

Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life . was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of Shiva, . to rock and sway and flap six arms and six legs to an inner tune. Hema moved gently . she danced as if her minimalist gestures were shorthand for a much larger, fuller, reckless dance, one that held the whole world together, kept it from extinction. Abraham Verghese

I welcomed my slavish existence as a surgical resident, the never-ending work, the cries that kept me in the present, the immersion in blood, pus, and tears -- the fluids in which one dissolved all traces of self. In working myself ragged, I felt integrated... Abraham Verghese

Surely you couldn't be a good doctor and a terrible human being---surely the laws of man, if not God, didn't allow it. Abraham Verghese

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not." -Cutting for Stone Abraham Verghese

Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine. And so I became a surgeon. Abraham Verghese

I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field–internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine. And so I became a surgeon. Abraham Verghese

[American ambulance crews] salvaged people we'd never see in Missing, because no one would have tied to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here. Abraham Verghese

We stopped you from going, didn't we? Me and Shiva. Our birth?" Don't be silly. Can you imagine me giving up this?" he said sweeping his hand to indicate family, Missing, the home he'd made out of a bungalow. "I've been blessed. My genius was to know long ago that money alone wouldn't make me happy. Or maybe that's my excuse for not leaving you a huge fortune! I certainly could have made more money if that had been my goal. But one thing I won't have is regrets. My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit. Of course, you and I have seen countless deaths among the poor. Their only regret surely is being born poor, suffering from birth to death. You know, in the book of Job, Job says to God, 'You should've taken me straight from the womb to the tomb! Why the in-between part, why life, if it was just to suffer?' Something like that. For the poor, death is at least the end of suffering. Abraham Verghese

My desire to be a physician had a lot to do with that sense of medicine as a ministry of healing, not just a science. And not even just a science and an art, but also a calling, also a ministry. Abraham Verghese

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

There are moments as a teacher when I'm conscious that I'm trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago. It's an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece. Abraham Verghese

We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine. Abraham Verghese

Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical. Abraham Verghese

Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be. I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around, but he carried it off so well. Abraham Verghese

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

I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and but for their services, I'm not sure how exactly we could manage. Abraham Verghese

The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician. Abraham Verghese

I've never bought this idea of taking a therapeutic distance. If I see a student or house staff cry, I take great faith in that. That's a great person; they're going to be a great doctor. Abraham Verghese

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

Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities. Abraham Verghese

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody. Abraham Verghese

Modern society has evolved to the point where we counter the old-fashioned fatalism surrounding the word 'cancer' by embracing the idea of the Uber-mind - that our will possesses nearly supernatural powers. Abraham Verghese