Top 350 Paul Kalanithi Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “The definitive test was the simplest: I raised the patient’s arm above his face and let go. A patient in a psychogenic coma retains just enough volition to avoid hitting himself. The treatment consists in speaking reassuringly, until your words connect and the patient awakens.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

206. “Conversely, we knew that one trick to managing a terminal illness is to be deeply in love – to be vulnerable, kind, generous, grateful.”

— Paul Kalanithi

207. “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

208. “I was leaving this small Arizona town in a few weeks, and I felt less like someone preparing to climb a career ladder than a buzzing electron about to achieve escape velocity, flinging out into a strange and sparkling universe.”

— Paul Kalanithi

209. “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

210. “Yet I returned to the central values of Christianity – sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness – because I found them so compelling. There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And the New testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”

— Paul Kalanithi

211. “The version of Paul I miss most, more even than the robust, dazzling version whom I first fell in love, is the beautiful, focused man he was in his last year. The Paul who wrote this book. Frail, but never weak.”

— Paul Kalanithi

212. “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

213. “As a doctor, you have a sense of what it’s like to be sick, but until you’ve gone through it yourself, you don’t really know.”

— Paul Kalanithi

214. “Not only that, but maybe the basic message of original sin isn’t “Feel guilty all the time.” Maybe it is more along these lines: “We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can’t live up to it all the time.” Maybe that’s what the message of the New Testament is, after all. Even if you have a notion as well defined as Leviticus, you can’t live that way. It’s not just impossible, it’s insane.”

— Paul Kalanithi

215. “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

216. “Death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire. There are, I imagine, two responses to that realization. The most obvious might be an impulse to frantic activity: to “live life to the 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.”

— Paul Kalanithi

217. “My patient needs lobster and steak – right away!” Turning back to her, he said, with a smile: “It’s on the way, but it may look more like a turkey sandwich.” The.”

— Paul Kalanithi

218. “I can’t go on, I thought, and immediately, its antiphon responded, completing Samuel Beckett’s seven words, words I had learned long ago as an undergraduate: I’ll go on. I got out of bed and took a step forward, repeating the phrase over and over: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

— Paul Kalanithi

219. “Being with patients in these moments certainly had its emotional cost, but it also had its rewards. I don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it. The call to protect life – and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul – was obvious in its sacredness.”

— Paul Kalanithi

220. “Weren’t the numbers just the numbers? Had we all just given in to the “hope” that every patient was above average? It occurred to me that my relationship with statistics changed as soon as I became one.”

— Paul Kalanithi

221. “Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?” she asked. “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. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.”

— Paul Kalanithi

222. “One chapter of my life seemed to have ended; perhaps the whole book was closing. Instead of being the pastoral figure aiding a life transition, I found myself the sheep, lost and confused. Severe illness wasn’t life-altering, it was life-shattering. It felt less like an epiphany – a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters – and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward. Now I would have to work around it.”

— Paul Kalanithi

223. “The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient’s eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon’s diagnosis. Sometimes.”

— Paul Kalanithi

224. “Somehow, I had to believe, I would gain not only knowledge but wisdom, too.”

— Paul Kalanithi

225. “Moral duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity, and so the duty to bear mortal responsibility pulled me back into the operating room.”

— Paul Kalanithi

226. “Medical training is relentlessly future-oriented, all about delayed gratification; you’re always thinking about what you’ll be doing five years down the line. But now I don’t know what I’ll be doing five years down the line. I may be dead. I may not be. I may be healthy. I may be writing. I don’t know. And so it’s not all that useful to spend time thinking about the future – that is, beyond lunch.”

— Paul Kalanithi

227. “One night on the sofa in my apartment, while studying the reams of wavy lines that make up EKGs, she puzzled over, then correctly identified, a fatal arrhythmia. All at once, it dawned on her and she began to cry: wherever this “practice EKG” had come from, the patient had not survived. The squiggly lines on that page were more than just lines; they were ventricular fibrillation deteriorating the asystole, and they could bring you to tears.”

— Paul Kalanithi

228. “All of medicine, not just cadaver dissection, trespasses into sacred spheres. Doctors invade the body in every way imaginable. They see people at their most vulnerable, their most sacred, their most private. They escort them into the world and then back out.”

— Paul Kalanithi

229. “Even working on the dead, with their faces covered, their names a mystery, you find that their humanity pops up at you – in opening my cadaver’s stomach, I found two undigested morphine pills, meaning that he had died in pain, perhaps alone and fumbling with the cap of a pill bottle.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

232. “Being with patients in these moments certainly had its emotional cost, but it also had its rewards. I don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it.”

— Paul Kalanithi

233. “Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. 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. We had assumed an onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility. Our.”

— Paul Kalanithi

234. “In that moment, all my occasions of failed empathy came rushing back to me: the times I had pushed discharge over patient worries, ignored patients’ pain when other demands pressed. The people whose suffering I saw, noted, and neatly packaged into various diagnoses, the significance of which I failed to recognize – they all returned, vengeful, angry, and inexorable.”

— Paul Kalanithi

235. “Science, I had come to learn, is as political, competitive, and fierce a career as you can find, full of the temptation to find easy paths.”

— Paul Kalanithi

236. “Maybe I’d been cursed by a Greek god, but abdicating control seemed irresponsible, if not impossible.”

— Paul Kalanithi

237. “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

238. “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.”

— Paul Kalanithi

239. “It’s easier when the patient is ninety-four, in the last stages of dementia, with a severe brain bleed. But for someone like me – a thirty-six-year-old given a diagnosis of terminal cancer – there aren’t really words.”

— Paul Kalanithi

240. “Medical training is relentlessly future-oriented, all about delayed gratification; you’re always thinking about what you’ll be doing five years down the line.”

— Paul Kalanithi

241. “To find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.”

— Paul Kalanithi

242. “Instead of being the pastoral figure aiding a life transition, I found myself the sheep, lost and confused.”

— Paul Kalanithi

243. “The armament varies, from prayer to wealth to herbs to stem cells.”

— Paul Kalanithi

244. “The ancient covenant is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

246. “I thought of our cozy bed empty at home, remembered falling in love in New Haven twelve years earlier, surprised right away by how well our bodies and limbs fit together, and thought of how ever since, we’d both slept best when entwined. I hoped with all I had that he felt that same restful comfort now.”

— Paul Kalanithi

247. “My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life. Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”

— Paul Kalanithi

248. “And the New Testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing, and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”

— Paul Kalanithi

249. “Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete. And truth comes somewhere above all of them... I sent you to reap what you have not worked for; others have done the work, and you are sharing the fruits of their work.”

— Paul Kalanithi

250. “Why was I so authoritative in a surgeon’s coat but so meek in a patient’s gown?”

— Paul Kalanithi