Quote

He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him.

Abraham Verghese

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Abraham Verghese
Age: 70
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Way
Madness
Behinds
Behind
Tree
Ladder
Ways
Escaping
Head
Ladders
House
Pulling
Many
Climbing

More quotes by Abraham Verghese

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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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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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If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
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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.
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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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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.
Abraham Verghese
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I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.
Abraham Verghese
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...guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
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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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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.
Abraham Verghese
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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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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.
Abraham Verghese
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How we treat the least of our brethren,... that's the measure of this country.
Abraham Verghese
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Make something beautiful of your life.
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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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'.
Abraham Verghese
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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.
Abraham Verghese
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Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted
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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No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
Abraham Verghese