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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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Abraham Verghese
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Holes
Straight
Crookedness
Stills
Slide
Still
Snake
Enough
Serpent
Slides
Snakes
Hole

More quotes by Abraham Verghese

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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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No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
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If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
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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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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
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In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
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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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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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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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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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We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.
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Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?
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The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
Abraham Verghese
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What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?
Abraham Verghese
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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.
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
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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
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Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?....I met his gaze and I did not blink. Words of comfort, I said to my father.
Abraham Verghese
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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.
Abraham Verghese