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Paul Kalanithi QUOTES

1 " What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

2 " Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including alas, the one that says entropy always increases. Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

3 " I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

4 " A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

5 " After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I’d experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she’d handed me the previous week. Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world. "

― Paul Kalanithi

6 " People often ask if it was calling. My answer always is yes. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

7 " Often I return to the grave after leaving flowers – tulips, lilies, carnations – to find the heads eaten by deer. It’s just as good a use for the flowers as any, and one Paul would have liked. The earth is quickly turned over by worms, the processes of nature marching on, reminding me of what Paul saw and what I now carry deep in my bones, too: the inextricability of life and death, and the ability to cope, to find meaning despite this, because of this. What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

8 " [H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture—and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

9 " The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement. "

― Paul Kalanithi

10 " mind was simply the operation of the brain, an idea that struck me with force; it startled my naive understanding of the world "

― Paul Kalanithi

Paul Kalanithi QUOTES

11 " Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

12 " Before operating on a patient's brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another's cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

13 " Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

14 " What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide but existential authenticity each person must find on her own. Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

15 " Dying in one’s fourth decade is unusual now, but dying is not. “The thing about lung cancer is that it’s not exotic,” Paul wrote in an email to his best friend, Robin. “The reader can get into these shoes, walk a bit, and say, ‘So that’s what it looks like from here. Sooner or later, I’ll be back here in my own shoes.’ That’s what I’m aiming for, I think. Not the sensationalism of dying and not the exhortations to gather rosebuds but: Here’s what lies up ahead on the road.” Of course, he did more than just describe the terrain. He traversed it bravely. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

16 " Time for me is now double-edged: every day brings me further from the low of my last relapse but closer to the next recurrence - and, eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

17 " There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And the New Testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing, and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

18 " Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried. Stepping back, I realized that I was merely confirming what I already knew: I wanted that direct experience. It was only in practicing medicine that I could pursue a serious biological philosophy. Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

19 " I can't go on. I'll go on. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air

20 " Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. "

― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air