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He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.

Abraham Verghese

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Abraham Verghese
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Dies
Live
Teaching
Taught

More quotes by Abraham Verghese

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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.
Abraham Verghese
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By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
Abraham Verghese
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Being the first born gives you great patience.
Abraham Verghese
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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
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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.
Abraham Verghese
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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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Geography is destiny.
Abraham Verghese
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The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
Abraham Verghese
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My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.
Abraham Verghese
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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
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...guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
Abraham Verghese
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No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you. And, oh yes, if you wanted, he would give you a haircut and pull your tooth while he was at it.
Abraham Verghese
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The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
Abraham Verghese
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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.
Abraham Verghese
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Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
Abraham Verghese
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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.
Abraham Verghese
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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.
Abraham Verghese
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Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals
Abraham Verghese
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There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
Abraham Verghese
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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