Quotes from Abraham Verghese

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled. She was ashamed that such a simple insight should have eluded her all these years. Make something beautiful of your life.

No, not Bach's 'Gloria.' Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.

vaccine for polio had been developed

Koshy Saar's response is indignant. "It's fiction! Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!

I am convinced that one can buy in Harrods of London a kit that allows an enterprising Englishman to create a British school anywhere in the third world. It comes with black robes, preprinted report cards for Michaelmas, Lent, and Easter terms, as well as hymnals, Prefect Badges, and a syllabus. Assembly required.

And as for my father? No, he wouldn't ever walk through those gates; I now knew that. Whatever Thomas Stone had, wherever he was at this moment, he had no idea what he'd given up in the exchange.

Now I saw this categorizing of my freezer food as a sign of the true chaos in my head.

Jeremiah 17 it is written, "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure, and who can understand it?

it the bloody-brinjal-and-bugger-all. Which is

I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field—internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine. And so I became a surgeon.

Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I've lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school.

telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology.

A good surgeon needs courage for which a good pair of balls is a prerequisite

the clerk in the ministry to correct this, he pulled out his original typescript. "See for yourself, madam. Quod erat demonstrandum it is Missing," he said, as if he'd proved Pythagoras's theorem, the sun's central position in the solar system, the roundness of the

Ghosh sighed, "I hope one day you see this as clearly as I did in Kerchele. The 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.

Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound.

You know what's given me the greatest pleasure in my life? It's been our bungalow, the normalcy of it, the ordinariness of my waking, Almaz rattling in the kitchen, my work, my classes, my rounds with the senior students. Seeing you and Shiva at dinner, then going to sleep with my wife...I want my days to be that way.

When she walked away I felt the weight of what she left unsaid. I wanted to call after her, Ma! You have it all wrong. But 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. They're certainly doing all these things to you. I

After just a week in the hospital, I felt I'd left America for another country. My world was a land of fluorescent lights where day and night were the same, and where more than half the citizens spoke Spanish. When they spoke English it wasn't what I expected in the land of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The bloodlines from the Mayflower hadn't trickled down to this zip code. Three

the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled

Nevertheless, I drove right past my landmark, an antique store which looked to me like an ordinary house with junk piled on the front porch.

Easiest thing in the world is to love a dying man.

she found her greatness, at last, found it in her suffering. Once you have greatness, who needs anything else?

The fact that people were attentive to his body does not compensate for their ignoring his being.