When Breath Becomes Air Quotes

“these moments, I acted not, as I most often did, as death’s enemy, but as its ambassador. I had to help those families understand that the person they knew—the full, vital independent human—now lived only in the past and that I needed their input to understand what sort of future he or she would want: an easy death or to be strung between bags of fluids going in, others coming out, to persist despite being unable to struggle. Had I been more religious in my youth, I might have become a pastor, for it was the pastoral role I’d sought.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“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.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“[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

“And so it was literature that brought me back to life.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Where did biology, morality, literature, and philosophy intersect?”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient’s eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon’s diagnosis. Sometimes the news so shocks the mind that the brain suffers an electrical short. This phenomenon is known as a “psychogenic” syndrome, a severe version of the swoon some experience after hearing bad news. When my mother, alone at college, heard that her father, who had championed her right to an education in rural 1960s India, had finally died after a long hospitalization, she had a psychogenic seizure—which continued until she returned home to attend the funeral.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Somehow, I had to believe, I would gain not only knowledge but wisdom, too.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I had passed from the subject to the direct object of every sentence in my life. In fourteenth century philosophy, the word patient simply meant" the object of an action, "and I felt like one. As a doctor, I was an agent, a cause; as a patient, I was merely something to which things happened”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement. Good intentions were not enough,”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“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.
While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons work in the crucible of identity: every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves, and every conversation with a patient undergoing brain surgery cannot help but confront this fact. In addition, to the patient and family, the brain surgery is usually the most dramatic event they have ever faced and, as such, has the impact of any major life event. At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living. Would you trade your ability—or your mother’s—to talk for a few extra months of mute life? The expansion of your visual blind spot in exchange for eliminating the small possibility of a fatal brain hemorrhage? Your right hand’s function to stop seizures? How much neurologic suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable? “Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“You have to figure out whats most important to you.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“He wanted to help people understand death and face their mortality.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“For much of his life, Paul wondered about death—and whether he could face it with integrity. In the end, the answer was yes. I was his wife and a witness.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“With little to distinguish one day from the next, time has begun to feel static. In English, we use the word time in different ways: “The time is two forty-five” versus “I’m going through a tough time.” These days, time feels less like the ticking clock and more like a state of being.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I began to see all disciplines as creating a vocabulary, a set of tools for understanding human life in a particular way.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I knew not to...ask" Why me? "(Answer: Why not me?)”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“As a doctor, you have a sense of what it's like to be sick, but until you've gone through it yourself, you don't really know....when you get an IV placed, for example, you can actually taste the salt when they start infusing it. They tell me that this happens to everybody, but even after eleven years in medicine, I had never known.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But what I desired—life—was not what I was confident about—death.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“He, uh—he apparently had a difficult complication, and his patient died. Last night he climbed onto the roof of a building and jumped off. I don’t really know anything else.” I searched for a question to bring understanding. None was forthcoming. I could only imagine the overwhelming guilt, like a tidal wave, that had lifted him up and off that building.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Doctors in highly charged fields met patients at inflected moments, the most authentic moments, where life and identity were under threat; their duty included learning what made that particular patient's life worth living, and planning to save those things if possible--or to allow the peace of death if not. Such power required deep responsibility, sharing in guilt and recrimination.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I thought back to med school, when a patient had told me that she always wore her most expensive socks to the doctor's office, so that when she was in a patient's gown and shoeless, the doctor would see the socks and know she was a person of substance, to be treated with respect. (Ah, there's the problem - I was wearing hospital-issue socks, which I had been stealing for years!”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici: “With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but ’tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Out of his pen he was spinning gold.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“But in residency, something else was gradually unfolding. In the midst of this endless barrage of head injuries, I began to suspect that being so close to the fiery light of such moments only blinded me to their nature, like trying to learn astronomy by staring directly at the sun. I was not yet with patients in their pivotal moments, I was merely at those pivotal moments. I observed a lot of suffering; worse, I became inured to it. Drowning, even in blood, one adapts, learns to float, to swim, even to enjoy life, bonding with the nurses, doctors, and others who are clinging to the same raft, caught in the same tide.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I didn't know. But if I did not know what I wanted, I had learned something, something not found in Hippocrates, Maimonides, or Osler: the physician's duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Looking out over the expanse ahead I saw not an empty wasteland but something simpler: a blank page on which I would go on.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. —Michel de Montaigne, “That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“After so many years of living with death, I’d come to understand that the easiest death wasn’t necessarily the best.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The only thing I have to tell you is: they can always hurt you more, but they can’t stop the clock.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air