Abraham Verghese Quotes

Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals

The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.

Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.

It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.

...guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.

My sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the ritual.

Yesterday misspent can't be recall'd Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.

Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.

Yesterday misspent can't be recall'dVanity makes beauty contemptibleWisdom is more valuable than riches.

When you win, you often lose, that's just a fact. There's no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart...

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

Everyone needed an obsession.

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.

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

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

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.

...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.

Do they li

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

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.

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'?

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.

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

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

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.