Top 350 Paul Kalanithi Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

220. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

222. “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

223. “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

224. “The news hit Paul hard. He said little, but as a neurosurgeon, he knew what lay ahead.”

— Paul Kalanithi

225. “I was neither angry nor scared. It simply was. It was a fact about the world, like the distance from the sun to the earth.”

— Paul Kalanithi

226. “No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience.”

— Paul Kalanithi

227. “I found Eliot’s metaphors leaking into my own language.”

— Paul Kalanithi

228. “From that point on, I resolved to treat all my paperwork as patients, and not vice versa.”

— Paul Kalanithi

229. “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

230. “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

231. “It was stunning: even someone I considered a moral exemplar had these questions in the face of mortality.”

— Paul Kalanithi

232. “Always the seer is a sayer,” Emerson wrote. “Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy.” Writing this book was a chance for this courageous seer to be a sayer, to teach us to face death with integrity. – Lucy Kalanithi.”

— Paul Kalanithi

233. “There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.”

— Paul Kalanithi

234. “A sigh, and Earth continued to rotate back toward the sun. –.”

— Paul Kalanithi

235. “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

236. “I see the possible futures, the breathing machines connected through a surgical opening in the neck, the pasty liquid dripping in through a hole in the belly, the possible long, painful, and only partial recovery – or, sometimes more likely, no return at all of the person they remember.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

238. “Although these last few years have been wrenching and difficult – sometimes almost impossible – they have also been the most beautiful and profound of my life, requiring the daily act of holding life and death, joy and pain in balance and exploring new depths of gratitude and love.”

— Paul Kalanithi

239. “No longer was getting in and out of bed to go to the bathroom an automated subcortical motor program; it took effort and planning.”

— Paul Kalanithi

240. “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

241. “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? 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

242. “This was summer at Sierra Camp, perhaps no different from.”

— Paul Kalanithi

243. “Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other in the world, and still, it is never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them, where, as at the end of that Sunday’s reading, where the sower and reaper can rejoice together.”

— Paul Kalanithi

244. “Yeah, I guess the science that excited me was about twenty-year projects. Without that kind of time frame, I’m not sure I’m all that interested in being a scientist.” I tried to console myself. “You can’t get much done in a couple of years.” “Right. And just remember, you’re doing great. You’re working again. You’ve got a baby on the way. You’re finding your values, and that’s not easy.” Later.”

— Paul Kalanithi

245. “Learn to be fast now. You can learn to be good later.” In the OR, everyone’s eyes are always on the clock. For the patient’s sake: How long has he been under anesthesia? During long procedures, nerves can get damaged, muscles can break down, kidneys can fail. For everyone else’s sake: What time are we getting out of here tonight?”

— 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. “Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past.”

— Paul Kalanithi

248. “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

249. “While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons work in the crucible of identity: every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves, and every conversation with a patient undergoing brain surgery cannot help but confront this fact.”

— Paul Kalanithi

250. “Then I recalled the times I had been wrong: the time I had counseled a family to withdraw life support for their son, only for the parents to appear two years later, showing me a YouTube video of him playing piano, and delivering cupcakes in thanks for saving his life.”

— Paul Kalanithi