Quote

The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.

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
Enough
Serpent
Slides
Snakes
Hole
Holes
Straight
Crookedness
Stills
Slide
Still
Snake

More quotes by Abraham Verghese

Image
By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
Abraham Verghese
Image
In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
Abraham Verghese
Image
A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.
Abraham Verghese
Image
What we are fighting isn't godlessness--this is the most godly country on earth. We aren't even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines... that helps. When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.
Abraham Verghese
Image
Being the first born gives you great patience.
Abraham Verghese
Image
No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
Abraham Verghese
Image
Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted
Abraham Verghese
Image
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
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
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.
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
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
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
Image
Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
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
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
If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
Abraham Verghese
Image
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
Image
Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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