Abraham Verghese Quotes, Suicide Quotes, Cancer 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?

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Suicide Quotes , Cancer Quotes

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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Teacher Quotes , Years Quotes

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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Years Quotes , Medicine Quotes

I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Destiny Quotes , Geography Quotes

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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Looks Quotes , Wheels Quotes

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

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Grief Quotes , Results Quotes

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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Country Quotes , Godly 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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Uncles Quotes , School Quotes

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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Blessed Quotes , Thinking Quotes

What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Ears Quotes , Emergencies 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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Baptism Quotes , President Quotes

Make something beautiful of your life.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Beautiful Quotes

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

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Guilt Quotes , Action Quotes

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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Motivation Quotes , Believe Quotes

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

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes

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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Son Quotes , Play Quotes

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

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Ordinary Quotes , Sacred Quotes

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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Believe Quotes , Doctors Quotes

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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Technology Quotes , Feelings Quotes

When I use the word 'healing', by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we're very good at handling, but there's always a sense of the violation. 'Why me?' 'Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else's?' And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Abraham Verghese Quotes , Spiritual Quotes , Jobs Quotes