Top 350 Paul Kalanithi Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 8

251. “I plod, I ponder. Some days, I simply persist.”

— Paul Kalanithi

252. “As we talked, I could see the enormousness of the choice she faced dwindle into a difficult but understandable decision. I had met her in a space where she was a person, instead of a problem to be solved.”

— Paul Kalanithi

253. “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

254. “Paul’s decision not to avert his eyes from death, epitomizes a fortitude we don’t celebrate enough in our death avoidant culture. His strength was defined by ambition and effort. But also by softness. The opposite of bitterness.”

— Paul Kalanithi

255. “Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.”

— Paul Kalanithi

256. “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

257. “The twilight existence of unconscious metabolism becomes an unbearable burden, usually left to an institution, where the family, unable to attain closure, visits with increasing rarity, until the inevitable fatal bedsore or pneumonia sets in. Some insist on this life and embrace its possibility, eyes open. But many do not, or cannot, and the neurosurgeon must learn to adjudicate.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

262. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

266. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

281. “But I never thought them meaningless. Now the time of day means nothing, the day of the week scarcely more... It’s not all that useful to spend time thinking about the future – that is, beyond lunch.”

— Paul Kalanithi

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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.”

— Paul Kalanithi

285. “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

286. “Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Montaigne, Frost, Greville, memoirs of cancer patients – anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality.”

— Paul Kalanithi

287. “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

288. “Another part wished she’d said, “Going back to being a neurosurgeon is crazy for you – pick something easier.” I was startled to realize that in spite of everything, the last few months had had one area of lightness: not having to bear the tremendous weight of the responsibility neurosurgery demanded.”

— Paul Kalanithi

289. “As my skills increased, so too did my responsibility. Learning to judge whose lives could be saved, whose couldn’t be, and whose shouldn’t be requires an unattainable prognostic ability.”

— Paul Kalanithi

290. “Cancer of the brain comes in two varieties: primary cancers, which are born in the brain, and metastases, which emigrate from somewhere else in the body, most commonly from the lungs.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “My imagined future and my personal identity collapsed.”

— Paul Kalanithi

296. “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

297. “Timpul are doua taisuri pentru mine acum. Fiecare zi ma aduce mai aproape de punctul cel mai de jos al ultimei mele caderi, dar si mai aproape de urmatoarea etapa. Iar in final, ma asteapta moartea. Poate mai tarziu decat cred, dar sigur mai devreme decat imi doresc.”

— Paul Kalanithi

298. “Although Paul accepted his limited life expectancy, neurologic decline was a new devastation.”

— Paul Kalanithi

299. “I had met her in a space where she was a person, instead of a problem to be solved.”

— Paul Kalanithi

300. “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.”

— Paul Kalanithi