Top 350 Paul Kalanithi Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “A scan showed that a benign brain tumor was pressing on her right frontal lobe. In terms of 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.”

— Paul Kalanithi

152. “Grand illnesses are supposed to be life-clarifying. Instead, I knew I was going to die – but I’d known that before. My state of knowledge was the same, but my ability to make lunch plans had been shot to hell. The way forward would seem obvious, if only I knew how many months or years I had left. Tell me three months, I’d spend time with family. Tell me one year, I’d write a book. Give me ten years, I’d get back to treating diseases. The truth that you live one day at a time didn’t help: What was I supposed to do with that day?”

— Paul Kalanithi

153. “I could hear Emma’s voice again: You have to figure out what’s most important to you. If.”

— Paul Kalanithi

154. “I was pursuing medicine to bear witness to the twinned mysteries of death, its experiential and biological manifestations: at once deeply personal and utterly impersonal.”

— Paul Kalanithi

155. “If I were a neurosurgeon and I announced that I had to leave my guests to go in for an emergency craniotomy, no one would say a word. But if I said I needed to leave the guests in the living room to go upstairs to write...”

— Paul Kalanithi

156. “I still had a lot of practical medicine to learn, but would knowledge alone be enough, with life and death hanging in the balance? Surely intelligence wasn’t enough; moral clarity was needed as well. Somehow, I had to believe, I would gain not only knowledge but wisdom, too.”

— Paul Kalanithi

157. “For much of his life, Paul wondered about death – and whether he could face it with integrity. In the end, the answer was yes. I was his wife and a witness.”

— Paul Kalanithi

158. “Sometimes the news so shocks the mind that the brain suffers an electrical short. This phenomenon is known as a “psychogenic” syndrome, a severe version of the swoon some experience after hearing bad news.”

— Paul Kalanithi

159. “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 death its cessation.”

— Paul Kalanithi

160. “The most obvious might be an impulse to frantic activity: to “live life to its fullest,” to travel, to dine, to achieve a host of neglected ambitions. 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 a day. It is a tired hare who now races. And even if I had the energy, I prefer a more tortoiselike approach. I plod, I ponder. Some days, I simply persist.”

— Paul Kalanithi

161. “Even in having children in this new life, death played its part.”

— Paul Kalanithi

162. “The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But what I desired – life – was not what I was confident about – death.”

— Paul Kalanithi

163. “Surely intelligence wasn’t enough; moral clarity was needed as well.”

— Paul Kalanithi

164. “I needed words to go forward.”

— Paul Kalanithi

165. “But here’s the thing I must come back to: the prose was unforgettable. Out of his pen he was spinning gold.”

— Paul Kalanithi

166. “If time dilates when one moves at high speeds, does it contract when one moves barely at all? It must: the days have shortened considerably.”

— Paul Kalanithi

167. “Nothing you do will ever be perfect, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t strive for perfection.”

— Paul Kalanithi

168. “Graham Greene once said that life was lived in the first twenty years and the remainder was just reflection. So.”

— Paul Kalanithi

169. “Over the last six years, I’d examined scores of such scans, on the off chance that some procedure might benefit the patient. But this scan was different: it was my own. I.”

— Paul Kalanithi

170. “The MRI shows a mass in your brain, which is causing your symptoms.” Silence. “Do you want to see the MRI?” “Yes.” I.”

— Paul Kalanithi

171. “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

— Paul Kalanithi

172. “Shouldn’t terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death? What better way to understand it than to live it?”

— Paul Kalanithi

173. “All of medicine, not just cadaver dissection, trespasses into sacred spheres.”

— Paul Kalanithi

174. “Yes, I thought, and therein was the paradox: like a runner crossing the finish line only to collapse, without that duty to care for the ill pushing me forward, I became an invalid.”

— Paul Kalanithi

175. “In that moment, I could only think of Samuel Beckett, the metaphors that, in those twins, reached their terminal limit: “One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second... Birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” I had stood next to “the grave digger” with his “forceps.” What had those lives amounted to?”

— Paul Kalanithi

176. “I feared I was on the way to becoming Tolstoy’s stereotype of a doctor, preoccupied with empty formalism, focused on the rote treatment of disease – and utterly missing the larger human significance.”

— Paul Kalanithi

177. “You have to figure out whats most important to you.”

— Paul Kalanithi

178. “If human relationality formed the bedrock of meaning, it seemed to us that rearing children added another dimension to that meaning.”

— Paul Kalanithi

179. “There we were, doctor and patient, in a relationship that sometimes carries a magisterial air and other times, like now, was no more, and no less, than two people huddled together, as one faces the abyss. Doctors, it turns out, need hope, too.”

— Paul Kalanithi

180. “I wondered if, in my brief time as a physician, I had made more moral slides than strides.”

— Paul Kalanithi

181. “It occurred to me that my relationship with statistics changed as soon as I became one.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

183. “If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. – Michel de Montaigne, “That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die” L.”

— Paul Kalanithi

184. “Neurocardiogenic syncope,” I whispered to myself. The autonomic nervous system briefly shutting down the heart. Or, as it’s more commonly known, a case of the nerves.”

— Paul Kalanithi

185. “Neurosurgery requires a commitment to one’s own excellence and a commitment to another’s identity. The.”

— Paul Kalanithi

186. “Maybe life is merely an “instant,” too brief to consider.”

— Paul Kalanithi

187. “V maintained that our only obligation was to be authentic to the scientific story and to tell it uncompromisingly. I’d never met someone so successful who was also so committed to goodness.”

— Paul Kalanithi

188. “I had passed from the subject to the direct object of every sentence in my life. In fourteenth century philosophy, the word patient simply meant “the object of an action,” and I felt like one. As a doctor, I was an agent, a cause; as a patient, I was merely something to which things happened.”

— Paul Kalanithi

189. “About God I could say nothing definitive, of course, but the basic reality of human life stands compellingly against blind determinism.”

— Paul Kalanithi

190. “Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger without stripes. After so many years of living with death, I’d come to understand that the easiest death wasn’t necessarily the best. We.”

— Paul Kalanithi

191. “I want everyone to know that even if I don’t see them, I love them. I cherish their friendship, and one more glass of Ardbeg won’t change that.”

— Paul Kalanithi

192. “Any part of me that identified with being handsome was slowly being erased-though, in fairness, I was happy to be uglier and alive.”

— Paul Kalanithi

193. “During lucid moments, I was acutely aware that with this many voices, cacophony results. In medicine, this is known as the WICOS problem: Who Is the Captain Of the Ship?”

— Paul Kalanithi

194. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

196. “A son’s death already defies the parents’ ordered universe; how much more incomprehensible is it when the patient is brain-dead, his body warm, his heart still beating?”

— Paul Kalanithi

197. “In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture.”

— Paul Kalanithi

198. “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.”

— Paul Kalanithi

199. “Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.”

— Paul Kalanithi

200. “In a world of asynchronous communication, where we are so often buried in our screens, our gaze rooted to the rectangular objects buzzing in our hands, our attention consumed by ephemera, stop and experience this dialogue with my young departed colleague, now ageless and extant in memory.”

— Paul Kalanithi