Abraham Verghese

“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.”

“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.”

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

“All possibilities resided within me, and they required me to be here. If I left, what would be left of me?”

“What we are fighting isn't godlessness--this is the most godly country on earth. We aren't even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines... that helps. When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.”

“Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.”

“I am forced to render some order to the events of my life, to say it began here, and then because of this, that happened, and this is how the end connects to the beginning, and so here I am.”

“There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-she had reached that point.”

“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.”

“This is my life, I thought, as my taxi slogged through heavy traffic and inched through the tunnel to Logan Airport. I have excised 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 just become the master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?”

“Call me old-fashioned," Deepak said, "but I've always believed that hard work pays off. My version of the Beatitudes. Do the right thing, put up with unfairness, selfishness, stay true to yourself... one day it all works out. Of course, I don't know that people who wronged you suffer or get their just deserts. I don't think it works that way. But I do think that one day you get your reward.”

“You see, young Dr. Marion, that's what makes us human. We always want more.”

“Being the firstborn gives you great patience. But you reach a point where after trying and trying you say, Patience be damned. Let them suffer their distorted worldview. Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It's a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you know you owe them nothing.”

“I realized that my father's absence is our slippers. In order to start to get rid of your slippers, you have to admit they are yours, and if you do, then they will get rid of themselves.”

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

“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”

“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.”

“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...”

“How we treat the least of our brethren,... that's the measure of this country.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.”

“Geography is destiny.”

“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 can play the 'Gloria'? 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.”

“Yesterday misspent can't be recall'dVanity makes beauty contemptibleWisdom is more valuable than riches.”

“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.”

“A man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world...”

“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.”

“I stepped out to the lawn. I remember the air that night, and how it was so brisk that it could revive the dead. The fragrance of eucalyptus stoking a home fire, the smell of wet grass, of dung fuel, of tobacco, of swamp air, and the perfume of hundreds of roses--this was the scent of Missing. No, it was the scent of a continent.”

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

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

“No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.”

“That's the funny thing about America - the blessed thing. As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others." p 405”

“it was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory." p 380”

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

“He invited me to a world that wasn't secret, but it was well hidden. 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." p 224”

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

“What neither the reader nor Stone would accept was that his self-amputation was as much and act of conceit as it was an act of heroism" p 61”

“The trajectory of her scholastic progress to that point was spectacular and unprecedented, a model for all youth; it was also an invitation to fate to stick out a foot and trip her.”

“All my ghosts had vanished; the retribution that they sought had been exacted. I had nothing more to give, and nothing to fear.”

“Do they listen?"He held up a finger. "Every year one does," he said, ginning, "But that one makes it worthwhile. Even Jesus only did twelve. I try to get one a year.”

“I could see that the almost mystical aura of this legendary surgeon -- the single-mindedness, the dedication, the skill -- was mere surface. The surgical persona was something he had crafter to protect himself. But what he had created was a prison. Anytime he strayed from the professional to the personal, he knew what to expect: pain.”

“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...”

“One operates in the now.”

“I always wondered if the good people who send us bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate.”

“To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.”

“He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.”

“I wanted to write down every bit of wisdom he could impart to me. All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them. I tried. 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 time 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”

“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.”