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Cutting for Stone QUOTES

Cutting for Stone QUOTES

81 " I loved those Latin words for their dignity, their foreignness, and the way my tongue had to wrap around them. I felt that in learning the special language of a scholarly order, I was amassing a kind of force. This was the pure and noble side of the world, uncorrupted by secrets and trickery. How extraordinary that a word could serve as a shorthand for an elaborate tale of disease. "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

82 " The observer, that old record keeper, the chronicler of events, made his appearance in that taxi. The hands of my clock turned elastic while I imprinted these feelings in memory. You must remember this. It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive.
Memory. "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

83 " As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled. She was ashamed that such a simple insight should have eluded her all these years. Make something beautiful of your life. Wasn't that the adage of Sister Mary Joseph Praise lived by? Hema's second thought was that she, deliverer of countless babies, she who'd rejected the kind of marriage her parents wanted for her, she who felt there were too many children in the world and felt no pressure to add to that number, understood for the first time that having a child was about cheating death. Children were the foot wedged in the closing door, the glimmer of hope that in reincarnation there would be some house to go to, even if one came back as a dog, or a mouse, or a flea that lived on the bodies of men. If, as Matron and Sister Mary Joseph Praise believed, there was a raising of the dead, then a child would be sure to see that its parents were awakened. Provided, of course, the child didn't die with you in a plane crash. "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

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

"God will judge us by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace. "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

85 " He had a theory that bedroom Amharic and bedside Amharic were really the same thing: Please lie down. Take off your shirt. Open your mouth. Take a deep breath...The language of love was the same as the language of medicine. "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

86 " She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life... As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled. "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

87 " He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him... "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

88 " What a journey...what a day...what madness, so much worse than tragic! What to do except dance, dance, only dance... "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

89 " The poorest in America are the sickets. Poor people can't afford preventive care or insurance. The poor don't see doctors. They show up at our doorstep when things are advanced. "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

90 " Or to think that before Pasteur's discovery of microbes, doctors fought duels over the merits of balsam of Peru vs. tar oil for wound infection. Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion. Still, each generation of physicians imagined that ignorance was the special provenance of their elders. "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

91 " ...just as she kept her thoughts to herself, I was learning to do the same. This was what growing up was about: HIDE the corpse, DON'T bare your heart, DO make assumptions about the motives of others. "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

92 " This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don't bare your heart, do make assumptions about the motives of others. They're certainly doing all these things to you. "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

93 " We have more English Bibles than there are English-speaking people in the entire country.” Matron had turned from the window and followed his gaze. “Polish Bibles, Czech Bibles, Italian Bibles, French Bibles, Swedish Bibles. I think some are from your Sunday-school children. We need medicine and food. But we get Bibles.” Matron smiled. “I always wondered if the good people who send us Bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate. "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

94 " Love so strong, without ebb and flow or crests and troughs, indeed lacking any sort of motion so that it had become invisible to him these seven years, part of the order of things outside his head which he had taken for granted. "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

95 " We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation. "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

96 " All possibilities resided within me, and they required me to be here. If I left, what would be left of me? "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

97 " 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 procession 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 , Cutting for Stone

98 " I wanted to write down every bit of wisdom he could impart to me. All sons should write down every word of what their fathers have to say to them. I tried. Why did it take an illness for me to recognize the value of time with him? It seems we humans never learn. And so we relearn the lesson every generation and then want to write epistles. We proselytize to our friends and shake time by the shoulders and tell them, "Seize the day! What matters is this moment!" Most of us can't go back and make restitution. We can't do a thing about our should haves and our could haves "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

99 " All my ghosts had vanished; the retribution that they sought had been exacted. I had nothing more to give, and nothing to fear. "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone

100 " ... her unhandsome, but beautiful friend of so many years... "

― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone