Top 350 Paul Kalanithi Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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, where, as at the end of that Sunday’s reading, the sower and reaper can rejoice together. For here the saying is verified that “One sows and another reaps.” 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

252. “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

253. “I remember Nuland, in the opening chapters of How We Die, writing about being a young medical student alone in the OR with a patient whose heart had stopped. In an act of desperation, he cut open the patient’s chest and tried to pump his heart manually, tried to literally squeeze the life back into him. The patient died, and Nuland was found by his supervisor, covered in blood and failure.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

255. “Always eat with your left hand. You’ve got to learn to be ambidextrous.”

— Paul Kalanithi

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “The mind was simply the operation of the brain.”

— Paul Kalanithi

260. “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. It was the relational aspect of humans that undergirded meaning. Yet somehow, this process existed in brains and bodies, subject to their own physiologic imperatives, prone to breaking and failing.”

— Paul Kalanithi

261. “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

262. “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

263. “At home in bed a few weeks before he died, I asked him, “Can you breathe okay with my head on your chest like this?” His answer was “It’s.”

— Paul Kalanithi

264. “It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn’t have any.”

— Paul Kalanithi

265. “Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes be crushed by the weight.”

— Paul Kalanithi

266. “Seeing the body as matter and mechanism is the flip side to easing the most profound human suffering.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “And so it’s not at all useful to spend time thinking about the future – that is, beyond lunch.”

— Paul Kalanithi

278. “And as I sat there, I realised that the questions intersecting life, death, and meaning, questions that all people face at some point, usually arise in a medical context. In the actual situations where once encounters these questions, it becomes a necessarily philosophical and biological exercise. Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws.”

— Paul Kalanithi

279. “I began to suspect that being so close to the fiery light of such moments only blinded me to their nature, like trying to learn astronomy by staring directly at the sun.”

— Paul Kalanithi

280. “The human brain has rendered the organism’s most basic task, reproduction, a treacherous affair. That same brain made things like labor and delivery units, cardiotocometers, epidurals, and emergency C-sections both possible and necessary.”

— Paul Kalanithi

281. “But my focus would have to be on my imminent role, intimately involved with the when and how of death – the grave digger with the forceps. Not.”

— Paul Kalanithi

282. “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

283. “The decision to operate at all involves an appraisal of one’s own abilities, as well as a deep sense of who the patient is and what she holds dear.”

— Paul Kalanithi

284. “They see people at their most vulnerable, their most scared, their most private. They escort them into the world, and then back out.”

— Paul Kalanithi

285. “He spent much of his life wrestling with the question of how to live a meaningful life. And his book explores that essential territory.”

— Paul Kalanithi

286. “And yet this is not always an easy place to be. The weather is unpredictable. Because Paul is buried on the windward side of the mountains, I have visited him in blazing sun, shrouding fog, and cold, stinging rain. It can be as uncomfortable as it is peaceful, both communal and lonely – like death, like grief – but there is beauty in all of it, and I think this is good and right. I.”

— Paul Kalanithi

287. “But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words.”

— Paul Kalanithi

288. “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.”

— Paul Kalanithi

289. “I remember thinking, You must remember this, because what was falling on my retina was precious.”

— Paul Kalanithi

290. “Residency education regulations had forced most programs to adopt shift work. And along with shift work comes a kind of shiftiness, a subtle undercutting of responsibility.”

— Paul Kalanithi

291. “I felt that to understand my own direct experiences, I would have to translate them back into language.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

293. “Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients:.”

— Paul Kalanithi

294. “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. Years.”

— Paul Kalanithi

295. “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

296. “I had traversed the line from doctor to patient, from actor to acted upon, from subject to direct object.”

— Paul Kalanithi

297. “Over the next seven years of training, we would grow from bearing witness to medical dramas to becoming leading actors in them.”

— Paul Kalanithi

298. “Even if God spoke to us, we’d discount it as delusional.”

— Paul Kalanithi

299. “Human knowledge is never contained in just one person.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi