Quote

In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.

Abraham Verghese

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Abraham Verghese
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Medicine
Short
Cutting
Need
Needs
Writing
Stamina
Cuts

More quotes by Abraham Verghese

Image
A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.
Abraham Verghese
Image
The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
Abraham Verghese
Image
It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
Abraham Verghese
Image
The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
Abraham Verghese
Image
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
Image
When you win, you often lose, that's just a fact. There's no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart.
Abraham Verghese
Image
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
Image
When I use the word 'healing', by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we're very good at handling, but there's always a sense of the violation. 'Why me?' 'Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else's?' And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.
Abraham Verghese
Image
She died chasing greatness and never saw it each time it was in her hand, so she kept seeking it elsewhere, but never understood the work required to get it or to keep it.
Abraham Verghese
Image
Geography is destiny.
Abraham Verghese
Image
We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
Abraham Verghese
Image
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
Image
I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net. Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care ... it is another story altogether.
Abraham Verghese
Image
No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
Abraham Verghese
Image
Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.
Abraham Verghese
Image
What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?
Abraham Verghese
Image
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.
Abraham Verghese
Image
Make something beautiful of your life.
Abraham Verghese
Image
The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.
Abraham Verghese
Image
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