Quote

Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.

Abraham Verghese

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Abraham Verghese
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Life
Literature
Spectrum
World
Beautiful
Activities
Human
Worlds
Humans
Keeping
Way
Keeps
Never
Activity
Abreast
Would
Imagination
Wider
Time
Alive
Visiting

More quotes by Abraham Verghese

Image
If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
Abraham Verghese
Image
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
Image
In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
Abraham Verghese
Image
You live it forward, but understand it backward.
Abraham Verghese
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
Abraham Verghese
Image
The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
Abraham Verghese
Image
Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
Abraham Verghese
Image
Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
Abraham Verghese
Image
She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
Abraham Verghese
Image
The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
Abraham Verghese
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
Abraham Verghese
Image
I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key all else follows from it.
Abraham Verghese
Image
When I use the word 'healing', by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we're very good at handling, but there's always a sense of the violation. 'Why me?' 'Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else's?' And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.
Abraham Verghese
Image
It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
Abraham Verghese
Image
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
Image
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