Quotes from Abraham Verghese

Success is not money. Success is you are fully loving what you are doing. That is success.

Please understand. This happened before her birth. She was born this way. Nothing you or anyone else did caused it. Understand? This isn't your fault. In Jeremiah, doesn't God say, 'Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee'?" "He does!" she says, shocked to hear a Bible verse from this worldly man.

What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear? Words of comfort.

In this upside down world, snarls are smiles, ugly is beautiful, and the crippled outwork the able bodied, but tears are the same.

Why was it one had to leave something, or have it taken away, to really appreciate it? But tonight, she's the storyteller, because he's hungry to hear every detail of her medical world, bringing his curiosity like a moth to anything that shines of new knowledge.

When they turn in, he says, "It must be so hard to see such suffering every day." He shudders. "I couldn't do it. Only luck and the grace of God keeps us free of such afflictions. We're so blessed, aren't we?

Secrecy lives in the same rooms as loneliness. His secret and his failing is that after his mother's betrayal he cannot risk love.

Find your backbone, or be swallowed whole.

He didn't disagree that God may have other plans for me, but he said sometimes we have to 'live the question,' not push for the answer.

she offered her arms, her hands, her kisses . . . and her willingness to be wounded.

Forgive me," she says now. "For what?" "For everything. Sometimes we can wound each other in ways we don't intend.

The chemachen who comes calling for a subscription one morning is no more than a boy, the growth on his upper lip so sparse that each hair could be named after an apostle.

you forgave me long ago. Why would I not do the same? So, whatever it is, I forgive you." She rises, touches his cheek, kisses him on his forehead

first, like a hornet's nest, it's no more than a fleck of mud in a wooden joist. But it grows, and portholes appear, and soon a steady drone can be heard within.

eyes open to this precious land and its people, to the covenant of water, water that washes away the sins of the world, water that will gather in streams, ponds, and rivers, rivers that float the seas, water that I will never enter.

more in your future mate than the evidence has already suggested.

we are merely renting these bodies of ours. You came into this world on an in breath. You will exit on an out breath. Hence, we say that someone has . . . ? 'Expired'!

The moment he jumped clear of the dugout, the moment his feet touched solid ground, he knew he'd cheated death. But he hadn't felt safe till this moment of seeing Parambil. He'd always imagined that as an adult he'd live in a bustling city far away from here, a place full of life. Only now has he grasped just how vital Parambil is to him, as necessary as his heart or his lungs. One leaves home at one's own peril.

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.

You can confide in quiet people. They make way for one's thoughts.

The days that follow feel awkward. But silence still feels better than confessing. Besides, how does one rationally explain irrational fears? He

only one "ginglymoarthrodial" joint, one that both hinges and slides: the TMJ, or temporomandibular joint.

Big Ammachi was shocked to see how thin she had become, her hair suddenly white at the temples; it was such a troubling sight in one so young.

Literacy alters patterns of life that have gone undisturbed for generations.