Top 350 Paul Kalanithi Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”

— Paul Kalanithi

54. “You that seek what life is in death, Now find it air that once was breath. New names unknown, old names gone: Till time end bodies, but souls none. Reader! then make time, while.”

— Paul Kalanithi

55. “If the weight of mortality does not grow lighter, does it at least get more familiar?”

— Paul Kalanithi

56. “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

57. “There must be a way, I thought, that language of life as experienced – of passion, of hunger, of love – bore some relationship, however convoluted, to the language of neurons, digestive tracts, and heartbeats.”

— Paul Kalanithi

58. “What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy.”

— Paul Kalanithi

59. “In taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”

— Paul Kalanithi

60. “To me, that hardness always seems brittle, unrealistic optimism the only alternative to crushing despair.”

— Paul Kalanithi

61. “Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.”

— Paul Kalanithi

62. “A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans that undergirded meaning.”

— Paul Kalanithi

63. “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

64. “He, uh – he apparently had a difficult complication, and his patient died. Last night he climbed onto the roof of a building and jumped off. I don’t really know anything else.” I searched for a question to bring understanding. None was forthcoming. I could only imagine the overwhelming guilt, like a tidal wave, that had lifted him up and off that building.”

— Paul Kalanithi

65. “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

66. “At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living. Would you trade your ability – or your mother’s – to talk for a few extra months of mute life?”

— Paul Kalanithi

67. “Doctors, it turns out, need hope, too.”

— Paul Kalanithi

68. “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

69. “Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.”

— Paul Kalanithi

70. “Suddenly, now, I know what I want. I want the counselors to build a pyre... and let my ashes drop and mingle with the sand. Lose my bones amongst the driftwood, my teeth amongst the sand... 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 living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”

— Paul Kalanithi

71. “Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words.”

— Paul Kalanithi

72. “That morning, I made a decision: I would push myself to return to the OR. Why? Because I could. Because that’s who I was. Because 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

73. “Death, so familiar to me in my work, was now paying a personal visit.”

— Paul Kalanithi

74. “The doctor will be in soon.” And with that, the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.”

— Paul Kalanithi

75. “They wrapped her in blankets and handed her to me. Feeling her weight in one arm, and gripping Lucy’s hand with the other, the possibilities of life emanated before us. The cancer cells in my body would still be dying, or they’d start growing again. Looking out over the expanse ahead I saw not an empty wasteland but something simpler: a blank page on which I would go on. –.”

— Paul Kalanithi

76. “Suffering can make us callous to the obvious suffering of another.”

— Paul Kalanithi

77. “The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out.”

— Paul Kalanithi

78. “At moments, the weight of it all became palpable. It was in the air, the stress and misery. Normally, you breathed it in, without noticing it. But some days, like a humid muggy day, it had a suffocating weight of its own.”

— Paul Kalanithi

79. “I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. 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. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”

— Paul Kalanithi

80. “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

81. “A tureen of tragedy was best allotted by the spoonful.”

— Paul Kalanithi

82. “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.”

— Paul Kalanithi

83. “Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried them.”

— Paul Kalanithi

84. “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

85. “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

86. “The defining characteristic of the organism is striving.”

— Paul Kalanithi

87. “After so many years of living with death, I’d come to understand that the easiest death wasn’t necessarily the best.”

— Paul Kalanithi

88. “Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.”

— Paul Kalanithi

89. “Moral duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity.”

— Paul Kalanithi

90. “The only thing I have to tell you is: they can always hurt you more, but they can’t stop the clock.” And.”

— Paul Kalanithi

91. “I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it.”

— Paul Kalanithi

92. “Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. 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 ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”

— Paul Kalanithi

93. “If boredom is, as Heidegger argued, the awareness of time passing, then surgery felt like the opposite: the intense focus made the arms of the clock seem arbitrarily placed. Two hours could feel like a minute.”

— Paul Kalanithi

94. “I had started in this career, in part, to pursue death: to grasp it, uncloak it, and see it eye-to-eye, unblinking.”

— Paul Kalanithi

95. “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

96. “What kind of life exists without language?”

— Paul Kalanithi

97. “Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation.”

— Paul Kalanithi

98. “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

99. “In the silences between his words, listen to what you have to say back. Therein lies his message.”

— Paul Kalanithi

100. “I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form.”

— Paul Kalanithi