Paul Kalanithi

“The defining characteristic of the organism is striving.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

“I needed words to go forward.”

— Paul Kalanithi

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person.”

— Paul Kalanithi

“to persist despite being unable to struggle.”

— Paul Kalanithi

“Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.”

— Paul Kalanithi

“I wasn't sure where my life was headed.”

— Paul Kalanithi

“A match flickers but does not light.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

“Seeing the body as matter and mechanism is the flip side to easing the most profound human suffering.”

— Paul Kalanithi

“Maybe Beckett's Pozzo is right. Maybe life is merely an "instant", too brief to consider.”

— Paul Kalanithi

“(...) the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.”

— Paul Kalanithi

“I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people,”

— Paul Kalanithi

“it was a love and empathy for those who suffered, for what they endured and what he might bring to bear.”

— Paul Kalanithi

“And so it's not at all useful to spend time thinking about the future - that is, beyond lunch.”

— Paul Kalanithi

“Indeed, this is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But that’s the point. Putting lifestyle first…

— Paul Kalanithi

“Patients, when hearing the news, mostly remain mute. (One of the early meanings of patient, after all, is “one who endures hardship…

— Paul Kalanithi

“Now more than ever, you have to be there for each other. I don’t want either of you staying up all night…

— Paul Kalanithi

“Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including, alas, the one that says entropy always increases. Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic…

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

“What had not changed, though, was the heroic spirit of responsibility amid blood and failure. This struck me as the true image…

— Paul Kalanithi

“deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your…

— Paul Kalanithi

“The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But what I…

— Paul Kalanithi

“I didn’t know. But if I did not know what I wanted, I had learned something, something not found in Hippocrates, Maimonides,…

— Paul Kalanithi

“And as I sat there, I realised that the questions intersecting life, death, and meaning, questions that all people face at some…

— Paul Kalanithi

“My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real…

— Paul Kalanithi

“And yet this is not always an easy place to be. The weather is unpredictable. Because Paul is buried on the windward…

— 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…

— Paul Kalanithi

“I thought of our cozy bed empty at home, remembered falling in love in New Haven twelve years earlier, surprised right away…

— Paul Kalanithi

“A scan showed that a benign brain tumor was pressing on her right frontal lobe. In terms of operative risk, it was…

— Paul Kalanithi

“This book carries the urgency of racing against time, of having important things to say. Paul confronted death—examined it, wrestled with it,…

— Paul Kalanithi

“In these moments, I acted not, as I most often did, as death’s enemy, but as its ambassador. I had to help…

— Paul Kalanithi

“Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives…

— Paul Kalanithi

“Once I had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, I began to view the world through two perspectives; I was starting to…

— Paul Kalanithi

“I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into…

— Paul Kalanithi

“By the end of medical school, most students tended to focus on "lifestyle" specialities - those with more humane hours, higher salaries,…

— Paul Kalanithi

“Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build…

— Paul Kalanithi

“The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient’s eyes when hearing…

— Paul Kalanithi

“I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the…

— Paul Kalanithi