Quotes from Abraham Verghese

The ambulance crews brought the victims to us before the tires on the wreck stopped spinning. They salvaged people we'd never see in Missing, because no one would have tried to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here. A

All water is connected and only land and people are discontinuous

Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I've lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school. Ahab, Queequeg, Ophelia, and other characters die on the page so that we might live better lives.

The tide had turned, and the worst possible thing had happened: my heroes had become the "bad guys," and one didn't dare say otherwise.

his crime was to belong to the losing side, or perhaps even the wrong side. But all he'd done was follow orders...

All water is connected, and her world is limitless. He stands at the limits of his.

amanuensis. A rapt

just as she kept her thoughts to herself, I was learning to do the same. This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don't bare your heart, do make assumptions about the motives of others. They're certainly doing all these things to you. I

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled. She

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.

But God's time isn't the same as hers. God's calendar isn't the one hanging in her kitchen. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. It's pointless chastising herself for not rescuing her mother sooner. Happened is happened, she thinks. The past is unreliable, and only the future is certain, and she must look to it with faith that the pattern will be revealed.

Whatever America needs, the world will supply. Cocaine? Colombia steps to the plate. Shortage of farmworkers, corn detasselers? Thank God for Mexico. Baseball players? Viva Dominica. Need more interns? India, Philippines zindabad!" I

Life comes from God and life is precious precisely because it is brief. God's gift is time. However much or however little one has of it, it comes from him.

The chaos and hurt in God's world are unfathomable mysteries, yet the Bible shows her that there is order beneath. As her father would say, "Faith is to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible.

The God who never interferes with drownings or train wrecks likes to peer in on the human experiment at such moments of reckoning, touching the scene with a little celestial light.

A man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world, Doctor?

in my day, molay, a girl couldn't dream like that. But you, my namesake, you can be a doctor, or lawyer, or journalist—anything you imagine. We lit that lamp to light your path.

They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize that no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.

the retrospectoscope, that handy tool of the wags and pundits, the conveners of the farce we call M&M—morbidity and mortality conference—will pronounce your decision right or wrong. Life, too, is like that.

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

They call out to a toddy tapper aloft in a palm tree, who gives them final directions.

Mary and Jeb were an item from the time they were both in knickers. Even gave her a ring. Then this month my brother ditches her just like that. I'm still mad.

The word "lazaretto" used to refer to a quarantine station where infectious patients could be isolated, but over time it came to mean a leprosy hospital.

On his convex forehead his namam is a vertical, three-pronged fork, the center stripe red and the flanking two white. It signals he's a Vaishnavite, holding Vishnu to be the supreme god in the pantheon.