Abraham Verghese Quotes

When you walk through the hospital, you waiver between feeling bad for everyone else and feeling bad for yourself. It's a war of the worlds - the healthy and the sick.

Many of us have experienced the pain that comes with watching a loved one suffer with a serious illness. We also know that we would do absolutely anything it takes to help them beat it.

I can't heal your pain but I can see it. And you don't have to be lost. Not forever.

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Sympathy is charming, but it does not make up for pain.

When you are in the midst of suffering you are looking for someone to be Jesus to you. You are looking for someone to love you and help take care of you, and reach out to you.

My mother told me, 'Son, nobody else but God knows.' And that's what I'm about - reaching out to the people, crying with them, giving them hope. Visiting the hospital, visiting the kids with cancer, visiting the adults, and stuff like that. That's what I do.

We should not clap our hands and mourn, for he is out of trouble. You are still in it.

In a place of pain, there is space for everyone.

People who have suffered know more about compassion.

When someone you love is in pain, you want to do anything to comfort them.

I don't think I ever sit there and think to kick a wound harder.

I've had the chance to meet families with children who are sick, and it's heartbreaking.

People, although having their own cross to carry, can minister to others through their own pain.

When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, "Darling, I care about your suffering," a deep healing begins.

What can we give a child when there is nothing left?

Those who have suffered make the best comforters.

Nothing is so healing as the human touch.

How many desolate creatures on the earth have learnt the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort, in a hospital.

She's lonely and wounded and very vulnerable and it really is a story about people at the heart of it all.

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'

You don't want to diminish anybody's pain and suffering.

My assignment is to take my situation and to use it to help others who feel hopeless and/or helpless because of loss.

I speak to people who have been through so much more.

The words of kindness are more healing to a drooping heart than balm or honey.