Top 100 Kalanithi Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Kalanithi

#1. But my focus would have to be on my imminent role, intimately involved with the when and how of death - the grave digger with the forceps. Not

Paul Kalanithi

#2. One chapter of my life seemed to have ended; perhaps the whole book was closing. Instead of being the pastoral figure aiding a life transition, I found myself the sheep, lost and confused. Severe illness wasn't life-altering, it was life-shattering.

Paul Kalanithi

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

Paul Kalanithi

#4. tureen of tragedy was best allotted by the spoonful.

Paul Kalanithi

#5. 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.

Paul Kalanithi

#6. 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 the living. We are never so wise as when we live in the moment.

Paul Kalanithi

#7. 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

#8. the heroic spirit of responsibility amid blood and failure. This struck me as the true image of a doctor.

Paul Kalanithi

#9. The root of disaster means a star coming apart.

Paul Kalanithi

#10. Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.

Paul Kalanithi

#11. Openness to human relationality does not mean revealing grand truths from the apse; it means meeting patients where they are, in the narthex or nave, and bringing them as far as you can.

Paul Kalanithi

#12. Neurosurgery requires a commitment to one's own excellence and a commitment to another's identity. The

Paul Kalanithi

#13. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward. And so it was literature that brought.

Paul Kalanithi

#14. And as I sat there, I realized that the questions intersecting life, death, and meaning, questions that all people face at some point, usually arise in a medical context.

Paul Kalanithi

#15. Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death - it's something that happens to you and those around you.

Paul Kalanithi

#16. I had traversed the line from doctor to patient, from actor to acted upon, from subject to direct object.

Paul Kalanithi

#17. Out of his pen he was spinning gold.

Paul Kalanithi

#18. Cadaver dissection epitomizes, for many, the transformation of the somber, respectful student into the callous, arrogant doctor.

Paul Kalanithi

#19. Yes, I thought, and therein was the paradox: 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

#20. If the hare makes too many missteps and has to keep adjusting, the tortoise wins. If the tortoise spends too much time planning each step, the hare wins.

Paul Kalanithi

#21. 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

Paul Kalanithi

#22. My brain was fine, but I did not feel like myself. My body was frail and weak - the person who could run half marathons was a distant memory - and that, too, shapes your identity. Racking back pain can mold an identity; fatigue and nausea can, as well.

Paul Kalanithi

#23. How much neurologic suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable?

Paul Kalanithi

#24. The truth that you live one day at a time didn't help: What was I supposed to do with that day?

Paul Kalanithi

#25. 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

Paul Kalanithi

#26. Some days, I simply persist.

Paul Kalanithi

#27. 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

#28. Medical training is relentlessly future-oriented, all about delayed gratification; you're always thinking about what you'll be doing five years down the line.

Paul Kalanithi

#29. In taking up another's cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.

Paul Kalanithi

#30. The call to protect life - and not merely life but another's identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another's soul - was obvious in its sacredness.

Paul Kalanithi

#31. I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I'm dying, until I actually die, I am still living.

Paul Kalanithi

#32. 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.

Paul Kalanithi

#33. Do you think my life has meaning? Did I make the right choices?

Paul Kalanithi

#34. To find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.

Paul Kalanithi

#35. What kind of life exists without language?

Paul Kalanithi

#36. 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

#37. At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living.

Paul Kalanithi

#38. A scan showed that a benign brain tumor was pressing on her right frontal lobe. In terms of operative risk, it was the best kind of tumor to have, and the best place to have it; surgery would almost certainly eliminate her seizures. The alternative was a lifetime on toxic antiseizure medications.

Paul Kalanithi

#39. The mind was simply the operation of the brain.

Paul Kalanithi

#40. 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

#41. Words have a longevity I do not.

Paul Kalanithi

#42. 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.

Paul Kalanithi

#43. 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

#44. In fourteenth-century philosophy, the word patient simply meant "the object of an action,

Paul Kalanithi

#45. 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.

Paul Kalanithi

#46. Only later would I realize that our trip had added a new dimension to my understanding of the fact that brains give rise to our ability to form relationships and make life meaningful. Sometimes, they break.

Paul Kalanithi

#47. 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...

Paul Kalanithi

#48. Nobody has it coming.

Paul Kalanithi

#49. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing

Paul Kalanithi

#50. Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including, alas, the one that says entropy always increases.

Paul Kalanithi

#51. Mortal duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity, and so the duty to bear mortal responsibility pulled me back.

Paul Kalanithi

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

Paul Kalanithi

#53. a family will visit constantly, daily or even twice a day. Then maybe every other day. Then just weekends. After months or years, the visits taper off, until it's just, say, birthdays and Christmas. Eventually, most families move away, as far as they can get.

Paul Kalanithi

#54. Even in having children in this new life, death played its part.

Paul Kalanithi

#55. This book carries the urgency of racing against time, of having important things to say. Paul confronted death - examined it, wrestled with it, accepted it - as a physician and a patient. He wanted to help people understand death and face their mortality.

Paul Kalanithi

#56. 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.

Paul Kalanithi

#57. 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

#58. My life up until my illness could be understood as the linear sum of my choices. As in most modern narratives, a character's fate depended on human actions, his and others.

Paul Kalanithi

#59. The curse of cancer created a strange and strained existence, challenging me to be neither blind to, nor bound by, death's approach. Even when the cancer was in retreat, it cast long shadows. When

Paul Kalanithi

#60. Neurosurgery seemed to present the most challenging and direct confrontation with meaning, identity, and death.

Paul Kalanithi

#61. Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation.

Paul Kalanithi

#62. The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But

Paul Kalanithi

#63. What are you most afraid or sad about?" she asked me one night as we were lying in bed.

"Leaving you," I told her.

Paul Kalanithi

#64. I was leaving this small Arizona town in a few weeks, and I felt less like someone preparing to climb a career ladder than a buzzing electron about to achieve escape velocity, flinging out into a strange and sparkling universe.

Paul Kalanithi

#65. Paul faced each stage of his illness with grace - not with bravado or a misguided faith that he would "overcome" or "beat" cancer but with an authenticity that allowed him to grieve the loss of the future he had planned and forge a new one.

Paul Kalanithi

#66. How little do doctors understand the hells through which we put patients.

Paul Kalanithi

#67. And even though I no longer really knew what it was, I felt it: a drop of hope. The fog surrounding my life rolled back another inch, and a sliver of blue sky peeked through.

Paul Kalanithi

#68. The MRI shows a mass in your brain, which is causing your symptoms." Silence. "Do you want to see the MRI?" "Yes." I

Paul Kalanithi

#69. You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.

Paul Kalanithi

#70. Doctors, it turns out, need hope, too.

Paul Kalanithi

#71. If the weight of mortality does not grow lighter, does it at least get more familiar?

Paul Kalanithi

#72. I was making the decision to do this work because this work, to me, was a sacred thing.) Lucy

Paul Kalanithi

#73. 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

#74. It's not fair - I've been diluting my drinks with water." A

Paul Kalanithi

#75. Over the last six years, I'd examined scores of such scans, on the off chance that some procedure might benefit the patient. But this scan was different: it was my own. I

Paul Kalanithi

#76. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. But now I knew it acutely.

Paul Kalanithi

#77. Learning to judge whose lives could be saved, whose couldn't be, and whose shouldn't be requires an unattainable prognostic ability.

Paul Kalanithi

#78. there's that study that says doctors do a worse job prognosticating for patients they're personally invested in.

Paul Kalanithi

#79. It's easier when the patient is ninety-four, in the last stages of dementia, with a severe brain bleed. But for someone like me - a thirty-six-year-old given a diagnosis of terminal cancer - there aren't really words.

Paul Kalanithi

#80. What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy.

Paul Kalanithi

#81. Maybe, in the absence of any certainty, we should just assume that we're going to live a long time. Maybe that's the only way forward.

Paul Kalanithi

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

Paul Kalanithi

#83. Always the seer is a sayer," Emerson wrote. "Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy.

Paul Kalanithi

#84. Part of the cruelty of cancer, though, is not only that it limits your time; it also limits your energy, vastly reducing the amount you can squeeze into one day.

Paul Kalanithi

#85. 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.

Paul Kalanithi

#86. This was summer at Sierra Camp, perhaps no different from

Paul Kalanithi

#87. There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.

Paul Kalanithi

#88. 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.

Paul Kalanithi

#89. And with that, the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.

Paul Kalanithi

#90. At home in bed a few weeks before he died, 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.

Paul Kalanithi

#91. A tureen of tragedy was best allotted by the spoonful. Only a few patients demanded the whole at once; most needed time to digest.

Paul Kalanithi

#92. 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

#93. The decision to operate at all involves an appraisal of one's own abilities, as well as a deep sense of who the patient is and what she holds dear.

Paul Kalanithi

#94. Paul," he said, "do you think my life has meaning? Did I make the right choices?"

It was stunning: even someone I considered a moral examplar had these questions in the face of mortality.

Paul Kalanithi