WisdomArea — Wisdom & Inspiration

"We stopped you from going, didn't we? Me and Shiva. Our birth"Don't be silly. Can you imagine me giving up this" he said sweeping his hand to indicate family, Missing, the home he'd made out of a bungalow. "I've been blessed. My genius was to know long ago that money alone wouldn't make me happy. Or maybe that's my excuse for not leaving you a huge fortune! I certainly could have made more money if that had been my goal. But one thing I won't have is regrets. My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit. Of course, you and I have seen countless deaths among the poor. Their only regret surely is being born poor, suffering from birth to death. You know, in the book of Job, Job says to God, 'You should've taken me straight from the womb to the tomb! Why the in-between part, why life, if it was just to suffer' Something like that. For the poor, death is at least the end of suffering."

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

"[American ambulance crews] salvaged people we'd never see in Missing, because no one would have tied to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here."

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

"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."

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

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

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

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

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

"Surely you couldn't be a good doctor and a terrible human being---surely the laws of man, if not God, didn't allow it."

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

"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..."

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

"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."

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

"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 play the 'Gloria'?"

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

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

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

"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."

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

"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, Cutting for Stone

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

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

"Do they li"

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

"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."

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

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

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

"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. It's 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."

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

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

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

"...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."

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

"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 father's caliber--that kind of talent, that kind of "brilliance," goes unheralded."

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

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