Abraham Verghese

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.

I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time goes on.

It was the kind of love that, sooner or later, cornered you with your pants down.

The way he looked at you, as if you were drinking water and his memory was the desert.

Any fool can diagnose, but it takes an expert to prescribe.

The capacity to make yourself do something you don’t want to do, whether it’s a sprint in the early morning or a push-up in the late afternoon, is the very essence of character.

The world is run by those who show up...not those who wait to be asked.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles.

The world is full of good men, but they marry the wrong women, and the world is full of good women, but they marry the wrong men.