Quotes by Abraham Verghese

My father, for whose skills as a surgeon I have the deepest respect, says, The operation with the best outcome is the one you decide not to do. Knowing when not to operate, knowing when I am in over my head, knowing when to call for the assistance of a surgeon of my fathers caliber--that kind of talent, that kind of brilliance, goes unheralded.

...a world where a sparrows fate and that of a man can be decided in the blink of a cats eye, such is the true measure of time.

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

Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration of the superorganism. Its a sound the new immigrant hears but not for long. By the time I learned to say 6-inch Number 7 on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce, the sound, too, was gone. It became part of the what the mind would label silence. You were subsumed into the superorganism.

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

Thats 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. Ive had my share of angels.

Do they li

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

it was all I had, all Ive ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory. p 380

You are an instrument of God. Dont 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 Bachs Gloria. Yours! Your Gloria lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.

Years later, when Idi Amin said and did outrageous things, I understood that his motivation was to rattle the good people of Greenwich mean time, have them raise their heads from their tea and scones, and say, Oh yes. Africa. For a fleeting moment theyd have the same awareness of us that we had of them.

Life is full of signs. The trick is to know how to read them. Ghosh called this heuristics, a method for solving a problem for which no formula exists.

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

Dont 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 play the Gloria?

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.

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...

Surely you couldnt be a good doctor and a terrible human being---surely the laws of man, if not God, didnt allow it.

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

Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.And so I became a surgeon.

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.