Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

— Abraham Verghese

Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.

— Abraham Verghese

Super organism. 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 super organism. 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 what the mind would label silence. You were subsumed into the super organism.

— Abraham Verghese

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

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— 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

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

The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese