"Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel."

"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."

"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."

"Most of us can't go back and make restitution. We can't do a thing about our should haves and our could haves. But a few lucky men like Ghosh never have such worries; there was no restitution he needed to make, no moment he failed to seize. Now and then Ghosh would grin and wink at me across the room. He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live."

"Being the firstborn gives you great patience. But you reach a point where after trying and trying you say, Patience be damned. Let them suffer their distorted worldview. Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It's a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you know you owe them nothing."

"It helps to be me, I suppose. To not expect too much."

"Indeed to think of life as tragic is a posture of delusion, for life is uniformly worse than tragic"

- Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone