Abraham Verghese Quotes

Please believe that I do this because I am convinced that my illness cannot be helped for any length of time and I cannot bear to be a burden on anyone any longer.

AIDS itself is subject to incredible stigma.

I think some people do want to die, and they will get a disease. There are people who know their lives are so troubled, and their bodies are getting them out of here.

Most recently my battle has been against AIDS and the discrimination surrounding it.

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.

The prejudice surrounding AIDS exacts a social death which precedes the actual physical one.

I do not view suicide as wicked, just terribly sad. There is only one death, but it is like a stone cast into a pond - the ripples stretch far. Such an act must leave a burden of sorrow, guilt, shame and confusion on an entire family. A natural death, such as my father suffered, is hard enough to deal with. A decision to end one's life must be still more devastating for those left behind. I cannot imagine the degree of hopelessness someone must feel to contemplate such an act.

Skepticism is slow suicide.

Death is what men want when the anguish of living is more than they can bear.

Melancholy suicide. - This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract.

When attempted self-destruction does not cure a man of life, it cures him of voluntary death.

My first understanding of HIV and AIDS was like everybody else from my generation. In the mid-'80s, we heard about this, and it was terrifying, because we knew nothing about how to respond to it appropriately, and we didn't really understand about how the virus is passed. There was a lot of misconception about that.

If killing yourself is not an option anymore, you have to sink into the darkness instead, and make something out of it.

I can almost understand why people leap from bridges.

Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.

It was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness.

Life is always sad. That's what makes suicide so tempting because life is all that we really have and haven't. Death makes us equals, too, because the foul and the good all die. The past, the present, and the future-what escape is there from these? None-and yet sometimes we are life's happy victims.

I just hope when my body goes, or when my mind does, I have the guts to end it the way Hemingway did. I don't want anybody wiping drool off my chin.

I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself

You know, it's a very treatable disease. You shouldn't feel ashamed. But I'm afraid that's carried on very much so from the first days of AIDS, when it was basically a gay disease. And then, of course, you know, it affected everybody.

the best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them

those who despair of life are not long for it.

…They think of suicide as a quick route to oblivion, an escape. Far from it. It merely alters a person from one form to another. Nothing can destroy the spirit. Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful.

Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74)

Everybody's having fun, except me I'm the lonely one I live in shame.