Best 41 quotes of Paul Kalanithi on MyQuotes

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.

Always the seer is a sayer,” Emerson wrote. “Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy.” Writing this book was a chance for this courageous seer to be a sayer, to teach us to face death with integrity. - Lucy Kalanithi

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.

And so it was literature that brought me back to life.

As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives -- everyone dies eventually -- but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness.

As in most modern narratives, a character’s fate depended on human actions, his and others. King Lear’s Gloucester may complain about human fate as “flies to wanton boys,” but it’s Lear’s vanity that sets in motion the dramatic arc of the play. From the Enlightenment onward, the individual occupied center stage. But now I lived in a different world, a more ancient one, where human action paled against superhuman forces, a world that was more Greek tragedy than Shakespeare. No amount of effort can help Oedipus and his parents escape their fates; their only access to the forces controlling their lives is through the oracles and seers, those given divine vision. What I had come for was not a treatment plan—I had read enough to know the medical ways forward—but the comfort of oracular wisdom.

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.

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.

Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?" "Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.

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.

Even if you are perfect the World isn't.

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

Human knowledge is never contained in just one person.

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.

I asked him, “Can you breathe okay with my head on your chest like this?” His answer was “It’s the only way I know how to breathe.

I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” - Samuel Beckett

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 word down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.

I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it. Paul is gone, and I miss him acutely nearly every moment, but I somehow feel I’m still taking part in the life we created together. “Bereavement is not the truncation of married love,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “but one of its regular phases—like the honeymoon. What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully through that phase too.” Caring for our daughter, nurturing relationships with family, publishing this book, pursuing meaningful work, visiting Paul’s grave, grieving and honoring him, persisting…my love goes on—lives on—in a way I’d never expected. - Lucy Kalanithi

If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?

I still had a lot of practical medicine to learn, but would knowledge alone be enough, with life and death hanging in the balance? Surely intelligence wasn't enough; moral clarity was needed as well. Somehow, I had to believe, I would gain not only knowledge but wisdom, too.

It’s very easy to be number one: find the guy who is number one, and score one point higher than he does.

Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.

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.

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.

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.

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

Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job-- not a calling.

Science, I had come to learn, is as political, competitive, and fierce a career as you can find, full of the temptation to find easy paths.

Struggle toward the capital-T Truth, but recognize that the task is impossible—or that if a correct answer is possible, verification certainly is impossible. In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them, where, as at the end of that Sunday’s reading, the sower and reaper can rejoice together. For here the saying is verified that “One sows and another reaps.” I sent you to reap what you have not worked for; others have done the work, and you are sharing the fruits of their work.

Students no longer had to bring their own bodies, for starters, as they did in the nineteenth century. And medical schools had discontinued their support of the practice of robbing graves to procure cadavers - that looting itself a vast improvement over murder, a once common means enough to warrant its own verb: *burke*, which the OED defines as "to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim's body for dissection.

then we all took time turns weeping, studying Paul’s face and each other’s with concern, steeped in the preciousness and pain of this time, our last hours all together. - Lucy Kalanithi

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

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.

There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.

The Servant Song” while standing side by side in a church pew, and the words vibrated with meaning as we faced uncertainty and pain together: “I will share your joy and sorrow / Till we’ve seen this journey through.” - Lucy Kalanithi

This is how 99% of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But that's the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job - not a calling.

We each joked to close friends that the secret to saving a relationship is for one person to become terminally ill. Conversely, we knew that one trick to managing a terminal illness is to be deeply in love—to be vulnerable, kind, generous, grateful.

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.

When there's no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon's only tool.

Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?" she asked. "Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?" "Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.

Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?' she asked. 'Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more pain¬ful?' 'Wouldn't it be great if it did?' I said. 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 characteris¬tic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger without stripes. After so many years of living with death, I'd come to understand that the easiest death wasn't necessarily the best. We talked it over. Our families gave their blessing. We decided to have a child. We would carry on living, instead of dying.