Quotes from Abraham Verghese

What is worry but fear of what the future holds? Baby Mol lives completely in the present and is spared all worry.

Big Ammachi asks Baby Mol the question, the one she has asked every night for over a decade now, a question that counts on Baby Mol's gift of prophecy.

A shaft of light from the window falls onto the paper. Has it been there all this time? Dust motes twirl inside like acrobats in a spotlight, freed from gravity, a sight so beautiful he feels a catch in his chest.

this water that is our covenant with you, with this soil, with the Life you granted us.We are born and baptized in this water, we grow full of pride, we sinew are broken, we suffer, but with water we are cleansed of our transgressions, we are forgiven, and we are born again, day after day till the end of our days.

She listens. She knows he has heard her. Because, as was always his way, he expresses his love for her the only way he knows how: through his silence.

The price of deceit is to feel like a cockroach.

Odat Kochamma is the tonic Parambil needs. The old lady is ceaseless in her toil. Within a week, Big Ammachi comes to rely on being fussed at, told to sit down and rest, or made to laugh so hard she has to pee.

The Madras evening breeze has a body to it, its atomic constituents knitted together to create a thing of substance that strokes and cools the skin in the manner of a long, icy drink or a plunge into a mountain spring.

He then defines for them its medial (closer to the midline), lateral (further from the midline), superior and inferior (or cranial and caudal), anterior, and posterior (or ventral and dorsal) aspects. Anything nearer to the center or closer to the point of attachment is "proximal" (so the knee is proximal to the ankle), while things further out are "distal" (the ankle being distal to the knee). They need this basic vocabulary to begin.

Well, Koshy Saar may not believe in God, but it's a good thing that God believes in that old man. Why else did he send him into your life?

During the inquiry she had tapped into the righteousness that was her due. She slapped down the least suggestion that she might be at fault. She had learned a lesson. To show weakness. To be tearful or shattered didn't serve her. One shouldn't just hope to be treated well, one must insist on it.

During the inquiry she had tapped into the righteousness that was her due; she slapped down the least suggestion that she might be at fault. She had learned a lesson: to show weakness, to be tearful or shattered didn't serve her. One shouldn't just hope to be treated well: one must insist on it.

What did it matter? We are dying while we are living. We are old even when we're young. We are clinging to life even as we resign ourselves to leaving it.

Mathachen, the tapper, also brews illicit arrack—not the anise-flavored arak of North Africa that Rune knows, but a tasteless distillate that Rune uses as an antiseptic.

Rune compounds a tincture of opium, arrack, lemon, and sugar into an apothecary bottle and heads back.

His mother's soul has been dead for years and her body has now followed.

It's fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

For twenty-eight years of Baby Mol's life, the sun has never failed to come up, yet every morning she's ecstatic at its return. To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy.

novels, the great lies that tell the truth, the world in its most heroic and salacious forms can always

The pulayar are the lowest caste in Travancore, rarely owning their own property, even their huts belonging to the landlord; the sight of them is enough to pollute a Brahmin

to be part of the fabric instead of a thread torn from the whole.

The valley below, the rock underfoot, and the mountain before him will outlast him. On the scale of this land, he is nothing; words like "shame" and "guilt" mean little here; and a reputation is no more than a fleeting blue flame, an evanescent spirit in a brandy glass.

In a life, it is the in-betweens that are fatal. It is the indecisiveness that killed his son.

Some part of him must know this is unreasonable even as he thinks it. But his mind can't accept the alternative. If it's all his fault, what earthly excuse does he have be still breathing?