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What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?

Abraham Verghese

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Abraham Verghese
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Clothes
Books
Book
Men
Fewer

More quotes by 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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Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?
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
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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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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.
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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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.
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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We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
Abraham Verghese
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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.
Abraham Verghese
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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.
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 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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In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we 'battle' cancer we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation. If we are fortunate, we 'beat' the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having 'succumbed after a long battle.'
Abraham Verghese
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Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
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.
Abraham Verghese
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Yesterday misspent can't be recall'd Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.
Abraham Verghese
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I always wondered if the good people who send us bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate.
Abraham Verghese
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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
Abraham Verghese
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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.
Abraham Verghese