Abraham Verghese Quotes

A man deep-wounded may feel too much pain To feel much anger.

You may feel singled out when adversity enters your life. You shake your head and wonder, 'Why me?'

There's nothing more raw in life than when you're sick.

Tragedy levels the playing field.

As a doctor, I was aware that when children go through severe trauma, they shouldn't see their parents completely disintegrate because subconsciously, that tells them they have no one to take care of them.

The lack of closure in an unsolved case seems to have a sharpening effect on those left behind; the details remain vivid to them even years later, possibly because they've gone over them looking for answers so many times.

For some people, it is easier to command a nation, to send thousands to their deaths in unnecessary wars, to separate children from their families and inflict terrible suffering, than to process their own trauma and pain.

AIDS is a shared truth - it's not selective in its wrath.

Do you want a sign that you're asleep? Here it is: you're suffering. Suffering is a sign that you're out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there's falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering.

Sometimes it just happens - to the wrong people at the wrong time.

All of the sudden, my right leg caved in. I crumpled to the floor in pain. The doctor weren't sure I'd ever be able to play again...and even if I did recover physically, the psychological scars of so traumatic an injury might never heal.

Pain is not the same as suffering. Left to itself, the body discharges pain spontaneously, letting go of it the moment that the underlying cause is healed. Suffering is pain that we hold on to. It comes from the mind’s mysterious instinct to believe that pain is good, or that it cannot be escaped, or that the person deserves it.

Each wedding picture was less of a memento than a scar. Proof of some horror movie scenario Katherine Kenton has survived.

There must be a reason that these bad things happen to me. I must be dysfunctional. So why would my dad leave? Why would he kill himself? Why would I be violated? And when you're 6-years-old, you can't comprehend that. But as you get much older in life, you begin to think what's wrong with me?

When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.

Just because your leg might heal doesn't mean it doesn't feel broken. It doesn't mean that a car hitting your body doesn't hurt like the same it would hurt if a car hit your body.

Unlike the vast majority of people, I've been locked in a box like an animal and I've also been on the receiving end of bloody thrashings, so I feel uniquely qualified to judge which is worse.

I think emotional and mental pain is probably worse than physical pain. I think we don't realize that I have no arms or legs but we all have disabilities of some sort, some fear, some lost, some wishes that didn't come true, things we wish would be better.

People can't seem to get it through their heads that there is never any healing or closure. Ever. There is only a short pause before the next "horrifying" event. People forget there is such a thing as memory, and that when a wound "heals" it leaves a permanent scar that never goes away, but merely fades a little. What really ought to be said after one of these so-called tragedies is, "Let the scarring begin.

Our bodies are but the anvils of pain and disease and our minds the hives of unnumbered cares.

Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.

That was the day my whole world went black. Air looked black. Sun looked black. I laid up in bed and stared at the black walls of my house….Took three months before I even looked out the window, see the world still there. I was surprised to see the world didn’t stop.

When something like this happens, you suddenly have no sense of reality at all. You have lost a piece of your past. The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was. It becomes impossible to look back at anything that's happened ... without wondering what was really going on.

no one had experiences any more, only traumas.

Few people who are hit once by someone they love respond in the way they might to a singular physical assault by a stranger.