Abraham Verghese - Cutting for Stone (2009)

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When you win, you often lose, that's just a fact. There's no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart...

Abraham Verghese
She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.

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

Abraham Verghese
Guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.

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

Abraham Verghese
Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted

Abraham Verghese
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.

Abraham Verghese
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...

Abraham Verghese
Yesterday misspent can't be recall'd Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.

Abraham Verghese
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.

Abraham Verghese
Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.

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

Abraham Verghese
Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?"... "Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223"... "And pray, why would this number interest us?" "It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, 'One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes'.

Abraham Verghese
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.

Abraham Verghese
A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.

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

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.

Abraham Verghese
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.

Abraham Verghese
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.

Abraham Verghese
Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals

Abraham Verghese
It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.

Abraham Verghese
We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

Abraham Verghese
We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.

Abraham Verghese
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.

Abraham Verghese
Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.

Abraham Verghese
If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.

Abraham Verghese
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.

Abraham Verghese