Abraham Verghese Quotes

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

— Abraham Verghese

“God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by
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

I spent as much time as I could with Ghosh. I wanted every bit of wisdom he could impart to me. All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them. I tried. Why did it take an illness for me to recognize the value of time with him? It seems we humans never learn. And so we relearn the lesson every generation and then want to write epistles. We proselytize to our friends and shake them by the shoulders and tell them, "Seize the day! What matters is THIS moment!" Most of us can't go back and make restitution. We can't do a thing about our should haves and our could haves. But a few lucky men like Ghosh never have such worries; there was no restitution he needed to make, no moment he failed to seize.
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

“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

“I chose the specialty of surgery because of Matron, that steady presence during my boyhood and adolescence. 'What is the hardest thing you can possibly do?' she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of the first half of my life.
I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap between ambition and expediency. 'Why must I do what is hardest?'
'Because, Marion, 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 play the 'Gloria'?
'But, Matron, I can't dream of playing Bach ... I couldn't read music.
'No, Marion,' she said her gaze soft ... '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

“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.”

— Abraham Verghese

“Geography is destiny.”

— Abraham Verghese

“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

“For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information. It seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a delayed flight, if it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one's fellow travelers.”

— 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

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.

— Abraham Verghese

“I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.”

— Abraham Verghese

“By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.”

— Abraham Verghese

“As a young physician in the mid-'80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.”

— Abraham Verghese

“Lets take away the incentives to do 'to' patients and instead create incentives to do 'for' patients, to be 'with' patients. We don't need to do comparative effectiveness trials to see if that works; we can just ask patients.”

— Abraham Verghese

Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.

— Abraham Verghese

“In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.”

— Abraham Verghese

“I always wondered if the good people who send us bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate.”

— Abraham Verghese

“What we are fighting isn't godlessness
this is the most godly country on earth. We aren't even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines ... that helps. When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.”

— Abraham Verghese

“Another day in paradise' was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understand what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift.”

— Abraham Verghese

Do they listen?"
He held up a finger. "Every year one does," he said, ginning, "But that one makes it worthwhile. Even Jesus only did twelve. I try to get one a year.

— Abraham Verghese

“When I wake to the gift of yet another sunrise my first thought is to rouse him and say, I owe you the sight of morning.”

— 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

“Why must I do what is hardest?" "Because, Marion, 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 play the 'Gloria'?”

— 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

“I'd become aware of human complexity
that's a kinder word than deceit.”

— Abraham Verghese

“What a journey ... what a day ... what madness, so much worse than tragic! What to do except dance, dance, only dance ...”

— Abraham Verghese

“I wanted to write down every bit of wisdom he could impart to me. All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them. I tried. Why did it take an illness for me to recognize the value of time with him? It seems we humans never learn. And so we relearn the lesson every generation and then want to write epistles. We proselytize to our friends and shake time by the shoulders and tell them, "Seize the day! What matters is this moment!" Most of us can't go back and make restitution. We can't do a thing about our should haves and our could haves”

— Abraham Verghese

“I am forced to render some order to the events of my life, to say it began here, and then because of this, that happened, and this is how the end connects to the beginning, and so here I am.”

— Abraham Verghese

“The master-word is Work, a little one, as I have said, but fraught with momentous sequences if you can but write it on the tablets of your hearts, and bind it upon your foreheads.”

— Abraham Verghese

“As a child I'd longed for Thomas Stone or at least the idea of him. So many mornings I waited for him at the gates of Missing. I saw that vigil now as necessary, a prerequisite for my insides to harden and cure just like the willow of a cricket bat must cure to be ready for a lifetime of knocks. That was the lesson at Missing's gates: the world does not owe you and neither does your father.”

— Abraham Verghese

“Everyone needed an obsession.”

— Abraham Verghese

“Or to think that before Pasteur's discovery of microbes, doctors fought duels over the merits of balsam of Peru vs. tar oil for wound infection. Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion. Still, each generation of physicians imagined that ignorance was the special provenance of their elders.”

— Abraham Verghese

You see, young Dr. Marion, that's what makes us human. We always want more.

— Abraham Verghese

Envy Is Behind Flattery.

— 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

“It seems we humans never learn. And so we relearn the lesson every generation and then want to write epistles. We proselytize to our friends and shake them by the shoulders and tell them, Seize the day! What matters is THIS moment!”

— Abraham Verghese

“I saw that vigil now as necessary, a prerequisite for my insides to harden and cure just like the willow of a cricket bat must cure to be ready for a lifetime of knocks.”

— Abraham Verghese

“It was the very moment when I thought, At last, she is going to stay, but in fact it was her good-bye.”

— Abraham Verghese

There wasn't any point in dwelling in the pain of the past, not when the future could hold suck pleasure.

— Abraham Verghese

“I realized if something happens to him, it happens to me, too. If I love myself, I love him, for we are one. That makes it a risk worth taking for me - it wouldn't be for anyone else, unless they loved him.”

— Abraham Verghese

And as for my father? No, he wouldn't ever walk through those gates; I now knew that. Whatever Thomas Stone had, wherever he was at this moment, he had no idea what he'd given up in the exchange.

— 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

“All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them.”

— Abraham Verghese

“Men like him became stubborn with opposition, because their convictions were all they had.”

— Abraham Verghese

“Sisters of the Nigrizia”

— Abraham Verghese

An admonishment of sorts, the gentle warning of one who arrived on an earlier ship: You there! Listen! Independence and resilience. This is what the new immigrant needs. Don't get fooled by all this activity. Don't invoke the superorganism. No, no. One functions alone in America. Begin now.

— Abraham Verghese

She found her greatness, at last, found it in her suffering. Once you have greatness, who needs anything else?

— Abraham Verghese

In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese