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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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Abraham Verghese
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Exceed
Grief
Result
Capacity
Results
Emote
Point
Exceeds
Human
Strangely
Humans
Composed

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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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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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You live it forward, but understand it backward.
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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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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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...guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
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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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I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.
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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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In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
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He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.
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Patients know in a heartbeat if they're getting a clumsy exam.
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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.
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What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?
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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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The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
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We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
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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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When you win, you often lose, that's just a fact. There's no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart.
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Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
Abraham Verghese