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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
Meant
Sacred
Ordinary
Happened
Intrusion
Ecstasy
Sudden

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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.
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He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.
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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.
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It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?
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God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by--by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace.
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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.
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Make something beautiful of your life.
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Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
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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.
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What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?
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Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
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