“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 for your patients. You can’t… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and… — 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… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
“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… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
“...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… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
“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… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
“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
“The funny thing about time in the OR, whether you race frenetically or proceed steadily, is that you have no sense of it passing.… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
“Learn to be fast now. You can learn to be good later.” In the OR, everyone’s eyes are always on the clock. For the… — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
“I felt that the last thing he needed was the obligation to service a new friendship.” — Paul Kalanithi Copy Share Image
