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I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don't postpone your dreams.

Abraham Verghese

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Abraham Verghese
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Dream
Hearing
Ends
Constant
Care
Dying
Life
Dreams
People
Taking
Feeling
Postpone
Age
Transient
Feelings
Quickly

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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.
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Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?
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She died chasing greatness and never saw it each time it was in her hand, so she kept seeking it elsewhere, but never understood the work required to get it or to keep it.
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Yesterday misspent can't be recall'd Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.
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How we treat the least of our brethren,... that's the measure of this country.
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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.
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Make something beautiful of your life.
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What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it. The process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialised language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
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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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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.
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In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
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Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
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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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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.
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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 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.
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Geography is 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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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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There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
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