02UndatedThe key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
03UndatedYesterday misspent can't be recall'dVanity makes beauty contemptibleWisdom is more valuable than riches.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
04UndatedGod 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.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
05UndatedWhen 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 / quote ↗
07UndatedBe ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
08UndatedChildren were the foot wedged in the closing door, the glimmer of hope that in reincarnation there would be some house to go to, even if one came back as a dog, or a mouse, or flea that lived on the bodies of men. If...there was a raising of the dead, then a child would be sure to see that its parents were awakened.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
09UndatedA man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world...Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
12UndatedI 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. I believe this is how Thomas Stone materialized in my life. If that's not the explanation, then I must invoke a disinterested God who leaves us to our own devices, neither causing nor preventing tornadoes or pestilence, but a God who will now and then stick his thumb on the spinning wheel so that a father who put a continent between himself and his sons should find himself in the same room as one of them.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
13UndatedGod will judge us by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
14UndatedDoubt is a first cousin to faith, Ghosh. To have faith, you have to suspend your disbelief.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
15UndatedThere is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
16UndatedWhen he recalls it in later years, he will wonder if he is distorting it, embellishing it, because each time he consciously recalls her, that forms a new memory, a new imprint to be stacked on top of the previous one. He fears that too much handling will make it crumble.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
17Undated... telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
18UndatedWhen a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
19UndatedTell 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 / quote ↗
20UndatedMy father, for whose skills as a surgeon I have the deepest respect, says, "The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do." Knowing when not to operate, knowing when I am in over my head, knowing when to call for the assistance of a surgeon of my father's caliber--that kind of talent, that kind of "brilliance," goes unheralded.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
21Undated...a world where a sparrow's fate and that of a man can be decided in the blink of a cat's eye, such is the true measure of time.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
22UndatedThe crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
23UndatedSuperorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration of the superorganism. It's a sound the new immigrant hears but not for long. By the time I learned to say "6-inch Number 7 on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce," the sound, too, was gone. It became part of the what the mind would label silence. You were subsumed into the superorganism.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
24UndatedNo blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.Abraham Verghese / quote ↗
