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: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Tree
Ladder
Ways
Escaping
Head
Ladders
House
Pulling
Many
Climbing
Way
Madness
Behinds
Behind

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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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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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Make something beautiful of your life.
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In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
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You are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can can play the 'Gloria'? No, not Bach's 'Gloria.' Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.
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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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To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.
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For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information. It seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a delayed flight, if it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one's fellow travelers.
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Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
Abraham Verghese
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Patients know in a heartbeat if they're getting a clumsy exam.
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In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
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No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
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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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I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and but for their services, I'm not sure how exactly we could manage.
Abraham Verghese
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I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.
Abraham Verghese
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The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.
Abraham Verghese
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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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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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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.
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