Quotes by Abraham Verghese

You live it forward, but understand it backward.

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 dont. If you keep saying your slippers arent yours, then youll die searching, youll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.

Yesterday misspent cant be recalldVanity makes beauty contemptibleWisdom is more valuable than riches.

God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by--by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I dont think God cares what doctrine we embrace.

When you win, you often lose, thats just a fact. Theres no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart...

Being the first born gives you great patience.

Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words.

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.

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

Everyone needed an obsession.

It was a tale well known to children all over Africa: Abu Kassem, a miserly Baghdad merchant, had held on to his battered, much repaired pair of slippers even though they were objects of derision. At last, even he couldnt stomach the sight of them. But his every attempt to get rid of his slippers ended in disaster: when he tossed them out of his window they landed on the head of a pregnant woman who miscarried, and Abu Kassem was thrown in jail; when he dropped them in the canal, the slippers choked off the main drain and caused flooding, and off Abu Kassem went to jail...One night when Tawfiq finished, another prisoner, a quiet dignified old man, said, Abu Kassem might as well build a special room for his slippers. Why try to lose them? Hell never escape. The old man laughed, and he seemed happy when he said that. That night the old man died in his sleep.We all saw it the same way. the old man was right. The slippers in the story mean that everything you see and do and touch, every seed you sow, or dont sow, becomes part of your destiny...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.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 dont. If you keep saying your slippers arent yours, then youll die searching, youll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.

Geography is destiny.

I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain. I believe this is how Thomas Stone materialized in my life. If thats not the explanation, then I must invoke a disinterested God who leaves us to our own devices, neither causing nor preventing tornadoes or pestilence, but a God who will now and then stick his thumb on the spinning wheel so that a father who put a continent between himself and his sons should find himself in the same room as one of them.

God will judge us by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I dont think God cares what doctrine we embrace.

Doubt is a first cousin to faith, Ghosh. To have faith, you have to suspend your disbelief.

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

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.

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

Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?....I met his gaze and I did not blink. Words of comfort, I said to my father.