Abraham Verghese quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Abraham Verghese has a lot to say. In this list we present the 53 best Abraham Verghese quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Abraham Verghese quotes
You live it forward, but understand it backward.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
Yesterday misspent can’t be recall’dVanity makes beauty contemptibleWisdom is more valuable than riches.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
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…
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
Being the first born gives you great patience.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
Everyone needed an obsession.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
Geography is destiny.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
… telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
…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, Cutting for Stone
The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
Do they li
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.” -Cutting for Stone
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.And so I became a surgeon.
— Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
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, Cutting for Stone
[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, Cutting for Stone
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
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