Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.
Interpretation
Literature enriches our imagination and exposes us to diverse human experiences.
Abraham Verghese's quote highlights the profound impact of literature on the human experience. It suggests that reading is not just a pastime, but a vital means of exploring new worlds and ideas that we might not encounter in our everyday lives. Through literature, we can broaden our understanding of diverse perspectives and the complexities of human activities, thereby keeping our imaginations vibrant and active.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of education, one might say, 'As Abraham Verghese noted, literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive.'
The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It's like a cancer that's metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?
We're losing a ritual. We're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.
I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient whose care I am taking over is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it's only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.
It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
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.
You are an instrument of God. 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 can play the 'Gloria'? No, not Bach's 'Gloria.' Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.
There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.
Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.
I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.
[On creating] And you get that little endorphin buzz, it's great. Why do you think Einstein looked like that? I don't think he was going "You know this is some dynamite weed! It's all relative you know."
Music, I think, is best when it honestly explores personal demons, and it stirs around in the silt of the psyche to find out what's really there.
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
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