Quotes from Abraham Verghese

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

As Philipose recalls this conversation of almost a decade ago, he's humbled to think that Joppan had been right: only a few years later, the Party won the majority of the seats in Kerala and formed the first democratically elected Communist government anywhere in the world.

Big Ammachi wants Philipose to ask Koshy Saar if this Moby-Dick isn't all made up. "It's entertaining. But isn't it one big lie? Ask him." Koshy Saar's response is indignant. "It's fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

Listening is talking for him; there's an eloquence to this kind of attentiveness; it's rare, and yet he's generous with it. He alone amongst all the people she knows uses his two ears and one mouth in that exact proportion.

I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn't to save the world as much as to heal myself.

I think legislation needs to put an end to doctors profiting on businesses to which they can funnel patients - that is business, not medicine. If you try to call it medicine, then it is corruption. Without legislation, it will keep happening.

Patients know in a heartbeat if they're getting a clumsy exam.

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.

What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?

A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.

When I wake to the gift of yet another sunrise my first thought is to rouse him and say, I owe you the sight of morning.

The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.

I always wondered if the good people who send us bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate.

Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted

The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It's like a cancer that's metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?

In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we 'battle' cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation. If we are fortunate, we 'beat' the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having 'succumbed after a long battle.'

When you have a natural genetic tan developed over centuries and many generations, the idea of soaking up rays by the pool has never made sense.

We're losing a ritual. We're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.

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

My deceased patients have taught me over the years to believe in the glass half full, to make good use of the time we have, to be generous - that was their lesson for the Uber-mind, and it was free. 'Do that,' they said, 'and then perhaps death shall have no dominion.'

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.

Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted

You live it forward, but understand it backward.

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.