"Years later, when Idi Amin said and did outrageous things, I understood that his motivation was to rattle the good people of Greenwich mean time, have them raise their heads from their tea and scones,..."
- Abraham Verghese
"Life is full of signs. The trick is to know how to read them. Ghosh called this heuristics, a method for solving a problem for which no formula exists."
"The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not."
"Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can play the 'Gloria'?"
"Hema thought of Shiva, her personal deity, and how the only sensible response to the madness of life . . . was to cultivate a kind of madness within, to perform the mad dance of Shiva, . . . to rock a..."
"I welcomed my slavish existence as a surgical resident, the never-ending work, the cries that kept me in the present, the immersion in blood, pus, and tears -- the fluids in which one dissolved all tr..."
"Surely you couldn't be a good doctor and a terrible human being---surely the laws of man, if not God, didn't allow it."
"The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not." -Cutting for Stone"
"Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine.And so I became a surgeon."
"I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field—internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding..."