Abraham Verghese > Quotes

“Why was it one had to leave something, or have it taken away, to really appreciate it?”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“....sometimes when your are most afraid, when you feel most helpless, that is when God is pointing out a path for you.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“Success is not money! Success is you are fully loving what you are doing. That only is success!”
― Abraham Verghese

“I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.”
― Abraham Verghese

“....the restless chattering in his head abruptly ceases. Just as the ocean manifests as a wave or surf, but neither wave nor surf is the ocean, so also the Creator - God or Brahma - generates an impression of the universe that takes the form of a Swedish doctor or a blind leper.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“If her son had a calling, had one passion, it was for wards on a page, and the magical way they could transport him and his listeners to faraway lands. "Ammachi, when I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in that time I've lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school. Ahab, QueeQueg, Ophelia, and other characters die on the page so that we might live better lives.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“We don't have children to fulfill our dreams. Children allow us to let go of the dreams we were never meant to fulfill,”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“Without the gift of pain, we have no protection”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“Where should the story begin? With "Doubting" Thomas, who insisted on seeing Christ's wounds before he'd believe? With other martyrs to the faith? What the child clamors for is the story of their own family, of the widower's house into which her grandmother married, a landlocked dwelling in a land of water, a house full of mysteries. But such memories are woven from gossamer threads; time eats holes in the fabric, and these she must darn with myth and fable.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“A rustle of leaves, a tremble transmitted through the ground, sends her heart racing. Something near the door blocks the starlight. Is this a household ghost coming to introduce itself?”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“Blessed indeed are the children, for they will never pass up sanctioned invitations to show up their parents.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“Naturally, when spices fetched the price of previous jewels in Europe, the Arab sailors who brought them from India kept their source a secret for centuries. By the 1400s, the Portuguese (and later the Dutch, the French, and the English) made expeditions to find the land where these priceless spices grew; these seekers were like randy youths who'd caught the scent of a loose woman. Where was she? East, always somewhere east.”
― Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

“You see, Ravi, this world isn't just all the things we can see and touch. It's also all the things we can't see, the things we choose to believe."
---Abscond (A Short Story)”
― Abraham Verghese

“No. A woman forgives the child, and she might even forgive the father. But she never forgets.”
― Abraham Verghese