Top 350 Paul Kalanithi Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

155. “At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living.”

— Paul Kalanithi

156. “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

157. “I needed words to go forward.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

159. “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

160. “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

— Paul Kalanithi

161. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

165. “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

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. “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

168. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “As a doctor, I was an agent, a cause; as a patient, I was merely something to which things happened.”

— Paul Kalanithi

178. “In my life, had I ever made a decision harder than choosing between a French dip and a Reuben? How could I ever learn to make, and live with, such judgment calls? I still had a lot of practical medicine to learn, but would knowledge alone be enough, with life and death hanging in the balance?”

— Paul Kalanithi

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

188. “Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?” “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” I said.”

— Paul Kalanithi

189. “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 immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur. This.”

— Paul Kalanithi

190. “Most lives are lived with passivity toward death – it’s something that happens to you and those around you. But Jeff and I had trained for years to actively engage with death, to grapple with it, like Jacob with the angel, and, in so doing, to confront the meaning of a life.”

— Paul Kalanithi

191. “Paul’s decision not to avert his eyes from death epitomizes a fortitude we don’t celebrate enough in our death-avoidant culture.”

— Paul Kalanithi

192. “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

193. “In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

195. “Getting too deeply into statistics is like trying to quench a thirst with salty water. The angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

197. “Emma was now the captain of the ship, lending a sense of calm to the chaos of this hospitalization. T. S. Eliot sprang to mind: Damyata: The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi