Abraham Verghese

“When I use the word 'healing,' by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we're very good at handling, but there's always a sense of the violation. 'Why me?' 'Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else's?' And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.”

“Lets take away the incentives to do 'to' patients and instead create incentives to do 'for' patients, to be 'with' patients. We don't need to do comparative effectiveness trials to see if that works; we can just ask patients.”

“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.”

“Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.”

“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. I've had my share of angels.”

“...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 joke, but only half joke, that if you show up in an American hospital missing a finger, no one will believe you until they get a CAT scan, MRI and orthopedic consult.”

“My sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the ritual.”

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

“As a young physician in the mid-'80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.”

“What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it - the process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialized language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism.”

“Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.”

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