Everyone needed an obsession.

— Abraham Verghese

Geography is destiny.

— Abraham Verghese

God will judge us by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace.

— Abraham Verghese

God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by--by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace.

— Abraham Verghese

Hemp 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. Hemp 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

I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain. Furthermore, I believe this is how Thomas Stone materialized in my life. If that's not the explanation, then I must invoke a disinterested God who leaves us to our own devices, neither causing nor preventing tornadoes or pestilence, but a God who will now and then stick his thumb on the spinning wheel so that a father who put a continent between himself and his sons should find himself in the same room as one of them.

— Abraham Verghese

I love to read poetry, but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

— Abraham Verghese

I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and for their services, I'm not sure how exactly we could manage.

— 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

It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory." p 380

— Abraham Verghese