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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
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Abraham Verghese
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Place
Hole
Nothing
Preserve
Preserves
Relief
Holes
Point
Descend
Free
Absurdity
Jobs
Arrive
More quotes by Abraham Verghese
Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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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.
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Another day in paradise' was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understand what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift.
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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI, or orthopedic consult.
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How we treat the least of our brethren,... that's the measure of this country.
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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.
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Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals
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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.
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Make something beautiful of your life.
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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.
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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.
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I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don't postpone your dreams.
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Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be. I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around but he carried it off so well.
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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.
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Being the first born gives you great patience.
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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.
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The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. Its like a cancer thats metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?
Abraham Verghese
