“By the end of medical school, most students tended to focus on "lifestyle" specialities - those with more humane hours, higher salaries, and lower pressures - the idealism of their med school application essays tempered or lost. As graduation neared… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
“Of course, the cadavers, in life, donated themselves freely to this fate, and the language surrounding the bodies in front of us soon changed to reflect that fact. We were instructed to no longer call them “cadavers”; “donors” was the… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
“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. But I could see that the idea of brain surgery terrified her, more than most. She was lonesome and in a strange place, having been swept… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share
“If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?” — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
“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… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share
“...but every day felt full of life, and of the relationships that give life meaning.” — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
“I struggled, while facing my own death, to rebuild my old life—or perhaps find a new one.” — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
“I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people,” — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
“When a patient comes in with a fatal head bleed, that first conversation with a neurosurgeon may forever color how the family remembers the… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
“To the east, the full light of day beamed toward you; to the west, night reigned with no hint of surrender. No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, “Let there be light!” You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share
“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… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share
“A scan showed that a benign brain tumor was pressing on her right frontal lobe. In terms of operative risk, it was the best… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
“Now more than ever, you have to be there for each other. I don’t want either of you staying up all night at the… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
