Abraham Verghese Quotes, Motivational Quotes, Destiny Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Motivational Quotes , Destiny Quotes

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?

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Suicide Quotes , Cancer Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Father Quotes , Comfort Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Shows Quotes , Love To Read Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Selfish Quotes , Heart Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Country Quotes , Thinking Quotes

I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it's only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Important Quotes , Way Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Baptism Quotes , President Quotes

According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn't speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did. Still, it's an apt metaphor for our profession. But there's another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Broken Quotes , Tasks Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Thinking Quotes , People Quotes

If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Ordinary Quotes , Sacred Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Uncles Quotes , School Quotes

He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Teaching Quotes , Taught Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Memories Quotes , Stories Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Heart Quotes , Thinking Quotes

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

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Physicians Quotes , Reform Quotes

In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we 'battle' cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation. If we are fortunate, we 'beat' the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having 'succumbed after a long battle.'

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Cancer Quotes , Taken Quotes

What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Book Quotes , Men Quotes

This is my life, I thought...I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil; I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?

6 years ago

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Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Cancer Quotes , Ocean Quotes