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By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.

Abraham Verghese

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Abraham Verghese
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Patient
Terms
Term
Patients
Helping
Visiting
Home
Cure
Come
Cures
Illness
Heal

More quotes by Abraham Verghese

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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.
Abraham Verghese
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What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it. The process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialised language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
Abraham Verghese
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There are moments as a teacher when I'm conscious that I'm trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago. It's an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.
Abraham Verghese
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What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?
Abraham Verghese
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You are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can can play the 'Gloria'? No, not Bach's 'Gloria.' Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.
Abraham Verghese
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I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain.
Abraham Verghese
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Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?... Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223... And pray, why would this number interest us? It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, 'One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes'.
Abraham Verghese
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Make something beautiful of your life.
Abraham Verghese
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She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
Abraham Verghese
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Yesterday misspent can't be recall'd Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.
Abraham Verghese
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We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
Abraham Verghese
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I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient it's only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.
Abraham Verghese
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I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key all else follows from it.
Abraham Verghese
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Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?....I met his gaze and I did not blink. Words of comfort, I said to my father.
Abraham Verghese
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Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.
Abraham Verghese
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That's the funny thing about America--the blessed thing. As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others. I've had my share of angels.
Abraham Verghese
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A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.
Abraham Verghese
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I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.
Abraham Verghese
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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.'
Abraham Verghese
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Being the first born gives you great patience.
Abraham Verghese