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To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.

Abraham Verghese

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Abraham Verghese
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Self
Glance
First
Glances
Expect
Confidence
Whose
Someone
Around
Firsts
Seductive

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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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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.
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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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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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In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
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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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That's the funny thing about America--the blessed thing. As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others. I've had my share of angels.
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What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?
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There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
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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.
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Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
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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.
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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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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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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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If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
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What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it. The process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialised language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
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I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.
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There are moments as a teacher when I'm conscious that I'm trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago. It's an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.
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