Quotes by Paul Kalanithi

“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....”

“Even if you are perfect the World isn't.”

“Human knowledge is never contained in just one person.”

“Literature not only illuminated another's experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection”

“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 literar...”

“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 deat...”

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

“A word meant something only between people, and lifes meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form.”

“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...”

“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.”

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

“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 sile...”

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

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

“Often I return to the grave after leaving flowers tulips, lilies, carnations to find the heads eaten by deer. Its just as good a use for the flowers as any, and one Paul would have liked. The ear...”

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

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

“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...”

“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 t...”

“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.”