Quotes from Abraham Verghese

I knew what I'd say to him: You're much too late. We went ahead with our lives without you.

I'm so sorry,' Stone said. I don't know whether he was speaking to me, or Ghosh, or the universe. It wasn't enough, but it was about time.

It was the very moment when I thought, At last, she is going to stay, but in fact it was her good-bye.

There it was, Hema must have thought; it was both the sorry and the thank-you that was so long overdue, and the funny thing was that at this moment, she didn't care. It no longer mattered. She didn't even look his way.

Mariamma, sometimes when you are most afraid, when you feel most helpless, that is when God is pointing out a path for you.

to think that before Pasteur's discovery of microbes, doctors fought duels over the merits of balsam of Peru versus tar oil for wound infection. Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion. Still, each generation of physicians imagined that ignorance was the special provenance of their elders.

The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark. William Yeats, "The Choice

Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life . . . was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of Shiva, . . . to rock and sway and flap six arms and six legs to an inner tune. Hema moved gently . . . she danced as if her minimalist gestures were shorthand for a much larger, fuller, reckless dance, one that held the whole world together, kept it from extinction.

Another day in paradise" was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understood what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift.

Envy Is Behind Flattery.

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

Why did it take an illness for me to recognize the value of time with him? It seems we humans never learn. And so we relearn the lesson every generation and then want to write epistles. We proselytize to our friends and shake them by the shoulders and tell them, "Seize the day! What matters is this moment!" Most of us can't go back and make restitution. We can't do a thing about our should haves and our could haves.

a child's ability for reprisal is infinite, and can last a lifetime.

And if beauty is in the ephemeral, what about the beautiful things you can't have? Perhaps that kind of beauty does last forever.

All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them.

Being the first born gives you great patience.

Most of us can't go back and make restitution. We can't do a thing about our should haves and our could haves. But a few lucky men like Ghosh never have such worries; there was no restitution he needed to make, no moment he failed to seize.

If Norman had found a way, had stumbled on a path--or, indeed, if he had not found a way--then I wanted to know. I was after something more intimate, something less elegant and Kübler-Ross's stages of denial, anger, bargaining, grieving and acceptance. I simply wanted to know how to accomplish a good death.

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.

I'm ashamed of our human capacity to hurt and maim one another, to desecrate the body. Yet it allows me to see the cabalistic harmony of heart peeking out behind lung, of liver and spleen consulting each other under the dome of the diaphragm -- these things leave me speechless.

You needed a guide. You had to know what to look for, but also how to look. 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.

Even before his brain digests these sights, his body—skin, nerve endings, lungs, heart—recognizes the geography of his birth. He never understood how much it mattered. Every bit of this lush landscape is his; its every atom contains him.

Whatever is next for me, whatever the story of my life, the roots that must nourish it are here.

The water she first stepped into minutes ago is long gone and yet it is here, past and present and future inexorably coupled, like time made incarnate. This is the covenant of water: that they're all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone.