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If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.

Abraham Verghese

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Abraham Verghese
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Intrusion
Ecstasy
Sudden
Meant
Sacred
Ordinary
Happened

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A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.
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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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I was angry with myself because I still loved her, or at least I loved that dream of our togetherness. My feelings were unreasonable, irrational, and I couldn't change them. That hurt.
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Patients know in a heartbeat if they're getting a clumsy exam.
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He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.
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Geography is destiny.
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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
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The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
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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.
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She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life... As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.
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You live it forward, but understand it backward.
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...guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
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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'.
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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.'
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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?
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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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We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
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The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.
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What we are fighting isn't godlessness--this is the most godly country on earth. We aren't even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines... that helps. When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.
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