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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
Abraham Verghese
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Abraham Verghese
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Destiny
Action
Become
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Omissions
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More quotes by Abraham Verghese
I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.
Abraham Verghese
We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.
Abraham Verghese
The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
Abraham Verghese
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
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
My sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the ritual.
Abraham Verghese
The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.
Abraham Verghese
We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.
Abraham Verghese
There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, 'You must read this.' I've always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America, a discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
Abraham Verghese
Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.
Abraham Verghese
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
No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
Abraham Verghese
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
He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him.
Abraham Verghese
How we treat the least of our brethren,... that's the measure of this country.
Abraham Verghese
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
You live it forward, but understand it backward.
Abraham Verghese
Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
Abraham Verghese
Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It's a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you owe them nothing.
Abraham Verghese
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.
Abraham Verghese