Quotes from Abraham Verghese

The uneventful day was a precious gift.

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.

In America, my initial impression was that death or the possibility of it always seemed to come as a surprise, as if we took it for granted that we were immortal, and that death was just an option.

Life is full of signs. The trick is to know how to read them. Ghosh called this heuristics, a method for solving a problem for which no formula exists.

We don't have children to fulfill our dreams. Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill.

I loved those Latin words for their dignity, their foreignness, and the way my tongue had to wrap around them. I felt that in learning the special language of a scholarly order, I was amassing a kind of force. This was the pure and noble side of the world, uncorrupted by secrets and trickery. How extraordinary that a word could serve as a shorthand for an elaborate tale of disease.

I have been bent and broken but I hope into better shape.

Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny. From "Cutting for Stone

To see the miraculous in the ordinary is a more precious gift than prophecy.

When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious." "God 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.

He had a theory that bedroom Amharic and bedside Amharic were really the same thing: Please lie down. Take off your shirt. Open your mouth. Take a deep breath... The language of love was the same as the language of medicine.

Yesterday misspent can't be recall'd Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.

What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?

just as she kept her thoughts to herself, I was learning to do the same. This was what growing up was about: HIDE the corpse, DON'T bare your heart, DO make assumptions about the motives of others.

The observer, that old record keeper, the chronicler of events, made his appearance in that taxi. The hands of my clock turned elastic while I imprinted these feelings in memory. You must remember this. It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.

How beautiful and horrible life is, Hema thought; too horrible to simply call tragic. Life is worse than tragic." p 108

She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life... As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.

Children 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.

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...

What a journey...what a day...what madness, so much worse than tragic! What to do except dance, dance, only dance...

This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don't bare your heart, do make assumptions about the motives of others. They're certainly doing all these things to you.

When 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.

Why must I do what is hardest?" "Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can play the 'Gloria'?

Love so strong, without ebb and flow or crests and troughs, indeed lacking any sort of motion so that it had become invisible to him these seven years, part of the order of things outside his head which he had taken for granted.