Abraham Verghese Quotes
As a young physician in the mid-'80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.
Quotes to Explore
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Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.
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I get offers all the time from film makers, but they are unknown quantities. I don't go there and do experiments.
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Every time a young girl comes in and asks me for advice, if you start your conversation with, 'How hard is it as a black woman,' or, 'How hard is it as a woman,' I turn you around. Because I cannot - we cannot look at the roadblocks and see the road at the same time.
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I got to the big leagues when I was 20. I thought I had it all figured out. Went to spring training that next year and started off well, got sent down, and I pouted pretty much all of 2000. And it wasn't the right way to handle it.
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Real luxury is having the time to read endless stories in bed with my children. And I get that all the time. I'm so blessed.
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If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.
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This opinion, however, is held by most, that the devil was an angel, and that, having become an apostate, he induced as many of the angels as possible to fall away with himself, and these up to the present time are called his angels.
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I actually spend very little time listening to any new music.
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As a boy soprano in the high school choir, I later sang a solo during the carol service at Canterbury Cathedral, but I was too young to secure the Freddy Eynsford-Hill role in our production of 'My Fair Lady' - and far too timid to have thought to audition for it.
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What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it's so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I've received a spam text.
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When I speak out against the guns or against the big corporations, some of my friends say, 'Oh Yoko, be careful. These people have all the power.' But, you know, most people don't speak out because they are frightened.
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Eddie Conway is central to my first memories. My parents used to take me to, when it was open, the Baltimore city penitentiary to see Eddie Conway - I was talking to my dad about this recently - from the time I might have been one or two years old. I mean, literally, my first memories are of black men in jail, specifically of Eddie Conway.
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I held a conference in Harvard where Americans said they didn't believe in risk. They thought it was just European hysteria. Then the terrorist attacks happened and there was a complete conversion. Suddenly terrorism was the central risk.
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When I met Eric Clapton, I was a very young girl. I was 20 years old. And we were linked for a very short time, and then we became friends. And then we lost touch, which I'm really sorry about.
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The art of boxing is seeing spaces and being able to take shots. The hitting and being hit have to become one. Your reactions have to be so in the moment. There's no time to think.
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I am really impressed by lawyers who write books and tell us that they never lost a case. Most lawyers who have never lost a case have not had enough hard cases. But there are very difficult cases out there.
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Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
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I have some friends, and they're super-hipster. And they're like, 'All I wanna do is sing in a jazz bar and to just make it to pay for the rent.' And I'm like, 'Cool... That's not what I wanna do. I want as many people as possible to go to my concert.'
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I have been lucky in my life to have met people that are special, so extraordinary talented that they somehow are on a different plane. Sometimes these amazingly talented people find a way to keep reinventing themselves to stay relevant and alive. Some fall under the crushing vibrancy of their own intensity.
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People love to hate the gravedigger.
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A lot of people in the U.S. used to say punk really didn't change anything, but I think it did. It was an intangible thing, not a visible thing. It took us through to a new phase of music and a way of seeing things.
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When I started working with NASA in 1989 as part of a mission to send spacecraft to Pluto, I knew it would take at least 10-15 years to see results of my efforts.
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We are born and reborn countless number of times, and it is possible that each being has been our parent at one time or another. Therefore, it is likely that all beings in this universe have familial connections.
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As a young physician in the mid-'80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.
