Cutting for Stone Quotes

“She had died chasing greatness and never saw it each time it was in her hand, so she kept seeking it elsewhere, but never understood the work required to get it or to keep it.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“she found her greatness, at last, found it in her suffering. Once you have greatness, who needs anything else?”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“A good surgeon needs courage for which a good pair of balls is a prerequisite,”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Ghosh sighed, "I hope one day you see this as clearly as I did in Kerchele. 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, Cutting for Stone

“How cruel it is that this memory should surface in a winter storm so long after she is dead. How cruel to have this fleeting, fragmented vision, seen through an ice-crusted window, then to wonder if it is real, or if it is the perturbation of a brain undone by alcohol. He has reassembled the memory like a shattered relic, and it is finally whole; and still he has doubts. He will never see her more clearly than that night at 529 Maple. When he recalls it in later years, he will wonder if he is distorting it, embellishing it, because each time he consciously recalls her, that forms a new memory, a new imprint to be stacked on top of the previous one. He fears that too much handling will make it crumble.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“And as for my father? No, he wouldn't ever walk through those gates; I now knew that. Whatever Thomas Stone had, wherever he was at this moment, he had no idea what he'd given up in the exchange.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“lacuna”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“fused, or—imagine this—sharing one trunk with two necks?”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“There’s no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart—she was thinking of Stone.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Medicine is a demanding mistress, yet she is faithful, generous, and true, She gives me the privilege of seeing patients and of teaching students at the bedside, and thereby she gives meaning to everything I do.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Thou shall not operate on the day of a patient’s death.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“He cringed when I said those words. No wonder he was reluctant to probe my past. No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“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.” He laughed as if he liked what”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Prison,” I’d heard Ghosh laughingly tell Adid, “is the best thing for a marriage. If you can’t send your spouse, then go yourself. It works wonders.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“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”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Knowledge shall be promoted by frequent exercise Art polishes and improves nature Fortune is a fair but fickle mistrefs Yesterday misspent can’t be recall’d Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“is … clean living will kill you, my friend.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“The bloodlines from the Mayflower hadn’t trickled down to this zip code.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“giving me the stethoscope, was saying, Marion, you can be you. It’s okay. He invited me to a world that wasn’t secret, but it was well hidden. You needed a guide. You had to know what to look for, but also how to look. You had to exert yourself to see this world. But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity, if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and if you went through that door, a strange thing happened: you left your petty troubles on the threshold. It could be addictive.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“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 that no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“WE COME UNBIDDEN into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot. I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“sir.” “Very good. You can come and assist me in surgery if you like, Mr.…” “Stone, sir. Thomas Stone.” During the surgery Braithwaite found Thomas knew how to stay out of the way. When Braithwaite asked him to cut a ligature, Stone slid his scissors down to the knot and then turned the scissors at a forty-five-degree angle and cut, so there was no danger to the knot. Indeed, Stone so clearly understood his role that when the senior registrar showed up to assist, Braithwaite waved him off. Braithwaite pointed to a vein coursing over the pylorus. He asked Thomas what it was. “The pyloric vein of Mayo, sir …,” Thomas said, and appeared about to add something. Braithwaite waited, but Thomas was done. “Yes, that’s what it’s called, though I think that vein was there long before Mayo spotted it, don’t you think? Why do you think he took the trouble”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“The croup following measles, on top of malnutrition, on top of rickets," he said to me under his breath. "It's the cascade of catastrophies.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“It was a sad fact that the commonest complaint in the outpatient department was “Rasehn . . . libehn . . . hodehn,” literally, “My head . . . my heart . . . and my stomach,” with the patient’s hand touching each part as she pronounced the words. Ghosh called it the RLH syndrome. The RLH sufferers were often young women or the elderly. If pressed to be more specific, the patients might offer that their heads were spinning (rasehn yazoregnal) or burning (yakatelegnal ), or their hearts were tired (lib dekam), or they had abdominal discomfort or cramps (hod kurteth), but these symptoms were reported as an aside and grudgingly, because rasehn-libehn-hodehn should have been enough for any doctor worth his salt. It had taken Matron her first year in Addis to understand that this was how stress, anxiety, marital strife, and depression were expressed in Ethiopia—somatization was what Ghosh said the experts called this phenomenon. Psychic distress was projected onto a body part, because culturally it was the way to express that kind of suffering. Patients might see no connection between the abusive husband, or meddlesome mother-in-law, or the recent death of their infant, and their dizziness or palpitations. And they all knew just the cure for what ailed them: an injection. They might settle for mistura carminativa or else a magnesium trisilicate and belladonna mixture, or some other mixture that came to the doctor’s mind, but nothing cured like the marfey—the needle. Ghosh was dead against injections of vitamin B for the RLH syndrome, but Matron had convinced him it was better for Missing to do it than have the dissatisfied patient get an unsterilized hypodermic from a quack in the Merkato. The orange B-complex injection was cheap, and its effect was instantaneous, with patients grinning and skipping down the hill. T”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound. I”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“As if my past life was revealed to be a waste, a gesture in slow motion, because what I considered scarce and precious was in fact plentiful and cheap, and what I counted as rapid progress turned out to be glacially slow. The”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone