Quotes from Abraham Verghese

When you win, you often lose, that's just the fact.

Out of his pen he was spinning gold.

The Arabs had the dry, musty smell of a grain cellar; the Asians contributed the ginger and garlic; and from the whites came the odor of a milk-soaked bib.

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.

Without Genet as a witness, nothing I did was meaningful.

The whisky burns. How strange to try to drown pain with fire.

God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by"—her voice broke as she thought of Sister Mary Joseph Praise—"by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace." The

I remembered... how the dust motes dancing in the morning rays formed their own galaxy. When I was a child, that sight had hinted at the wonderful and frightening complexity of the university, of how the closer one looked the more one saw revealed, and on'es imagination was the only limit.

Doing the wrong thing to do the right thing

This is the covenant of water: that they're all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone. She stays there listening to the burbling mantra, the chant that never ceases, repeating its message that all is one. What she thought was her life is all maya, all illusion, but it is one shared illusion. And what else can she do but go on.

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!

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.

worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life, and faith is the oil

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

But for a four-year-old, everything is sacred and ordinary.

Now I understood what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift.

When you win, you often lose

Marion, I know you think I favored Shiva Ã¢â'¬Â¦ And maybe I did. What can I say but that I'm sorry. A mother loves her children equally Ã¢â'¬Â¦ but sometimes one child needs more help, more attention, to get by in the world. Shiva needed that.

There's no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart

La clave de vuestra felicidad es aceptar vuestras babuchas, lo que sois, vuestro aspecto, a vuestra familia, las dotes que tenéis y las que no tenéis. Si seguís repitiendo que vuestras babuchas no son vuestras, moriréis buscando y amargados, creyendo siempre que os habían prometido más. «No sólo se convierten en nuestro destino nuestras acciones, sino también nuestras omisiones.»

God's time isn't the same as hers. God's calendar isn't the one hanging in her kitchen.

don't know how many minutes I stood there. It was precisely the comfort she seemed to need this night. If only she had known to ask, or I to give, we could've done away with the blindfold Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Thank God for the blindfold. She

understood for the first time that having a child was about cheating death. 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 a flea that lived on the bodies of men. If

All water is connected and only land and people are discontinuous. And