When Breath Becomes Air Quotes

“Another part wished she’d said, “Going back to being a neurosurgeon is crazy for you—pick something easier.” I was startled to realize that in spite of everything, the last few months had had one area of lightness: not having to bear the tremendous weight of the responsibility neurosurgery demanded”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin; And breastless creatures under ground Leaned backward with a lipless grin. —T. S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients:”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“sand….I don’t believe in the wisdom of children, nor in the wisdom of the old. There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I was startled to realize that in spite of everything, the last few months had had one area of lightness: not having to bear the tremendous weight of the responsibility neurosurgery demanded—and part of me wanted to be excused from picking up the yoke again. Neurosurgery is really hard work, and no one would have faulted me for not going back. (People often ask if it is a calling, and my answer is always yes. You can’t see it as a job, because if it’s a job, it’s one of the worst jobs there is.) A couple of my professors actively discouraged the idea: “Shouldn’t you be spending time with your family?” ( “Shouldn’t you?” I wondered. I was making the decision to do this work because this work, to me, was a sacred thing.)”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Moral duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity, and so the duty to bear mortal responsibility pulled me back into the operating room. Lucy was fully supportive.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. 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. It was the relational aspect of humans—i.e., “human relationality” —that undergirded meaning.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Grand illnesses are supposed to be life-clarifying.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“like a runner crossing the finish line only to collapse, without that duty to care for the ill pushing me forward, I became an invalid.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning—to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That’s not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn’t have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge. Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. 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. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“My state of knowledge was the same, but my ability to make lunch plans had been shot to hell. The way forward would seem obvious, if only I knew how many months or years I had left. Tell me three months, I’d spend time with family. Tell me one year, I’d write a book. Give me ten years, I’d get back to treating diseases.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“We had assumed an onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility. Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn’t. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“She was worried about it too. She was upset because I wasn't talking to her about it. She was upset because I'd promised her one life, and given her another.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Yet I returned to the central values of Christianity—sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness—because I found them so compelling. 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. Not only that, but maybe the basic message of original sin isn’t “Feel guilty all the time.” Maybe it is more along these lines: “We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can’t live up to it all the time.” Maybe that’s what the message of the New Testament is, after all.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“In truth, cancer had helped save our marriage.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“And even if I had the energy, I prefer a more tortoiselike approach”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I plod, I ponder. Some days, I simply persist.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air