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

There are moments as a teacher when I'm conscious that I'm trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago. It's an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.

— Abraham Verghese

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese

We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.

— Abraham Verghese

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 processions 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

What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it - the process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialized language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism.

— Abraham Verghese

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

— Abraham Verghese