Quotes from Abraham Verghese

This is my life, I thought...I have exised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil; I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mudstained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?

Ghosh trusted me to do whatever it is I would choose to do. That, too, is love. He'd been dead more than a quarter century and he was still teaching me about the trust that comes only from true love.

Everyone needed an obsession.

When you win, you often lose, that's just a fact.

They realize that no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.

Your "Gloria" lives within you.

How we treat the least of our brethren, how we treat the peasant suffering with volvulus, that's the measure of this country. Not our fighter planes or tanks

We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

You can't walk across a lake just because you change its name to "land." Labels matter.

and there will be no more interruptions and you will be staying for dessert, coffee, and cigars.

The uneventful day is a precious gift.

I welcomed my slavish existence as a surgical resident, the never-ending work, the cries that kept me in the present, the immersion in blood, pus, and tears -- the fluids in which one dissolved all traces of self. In working myself ragged, I felt integrated...

So Medicare decided to pay hospitals like ours for internship and residency training programs, get it? It's a win-win, as they say—the hospital gets patients cared for by interns and residents around the clock,people like us who live on site, and whose stipend is a bloody fraction of what the hospital would pay full-time physicians. And Medicare delivers health care to the poor.

no money, no church service, no eulogy,no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit." p 354

Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?

I saw that vigil now as necessary, a prerequisite for my insides to harden and cure just like the willow of a cricket bat must cure to be ready for a lifetime of knocks.

You had to exert yourself to see this world. But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity, if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and if you went through that door, a strange thing happened: you left your petty troubles on the threshold. It could be addictive

Surely you couldn't be a good doctor and a terrible human being---surely the laws of man, if not God, didn't allow it.

There's another kind of hole and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

There wasn't any point in dwelling in the pain of the past, not when the future could hold suck pleasure.

Impending death had a way of unexpectedly unearthing the past so that it came together with the present in an unholy coupling.

I realized if something happens to him, it happens to me, too. If I love myself, I love him, for we are one. That makes it a risk worth taking for me - it wouldn't be for anyone else, unless they loved him.

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not." -Cutting for Stone

She drew others to her like acolytes only for them to discover she wasn't recruiting.