Top 350 Paul Kalanithi Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “We each joked to close friends that the secret to saving a relationship is for one person to become terminally ill.”

— Paul Kalanithi

303. “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

304. “It’s not fair – I’ve been diluting my drinks with water.” A.”

— Paul Kalanithi

305. “Some days, I simply persist.”

— Paul Kalanithi

306. “Brave New World founded my nascent moral philosophy and became the subject of my college admissions essay, in which I argued that happiness was not the point of life.”

— Paul Kalanithi

307. “Severe illness wasn’t life-altering, it was life-shattering.”

— Paul Kalanithi

308. “And even if I had the energy, I prefer a more tortoiselike approach.”

— Paul Kalanithi

309. “Day after day I kept at it, and every tiny increase in strength broaden the possible worlds, the possible versions of me.”

— Paul Kalanithi

310. “Paul napped comfortably in the afternoon. But he was gravely ill. I started to cry as I watched him sleep. I crept out to our living room where his father’s tears joined mine. I already missed him.”

— Paul Kalanithi

311. “Few books I had read so directly and wholly addressed that fundamental fact of existence: all organisms, whether goldfish or grandchild, die.”

— Paul Kalanithi

312. “I wasn’t sure where my life was headed.”

— Paul Kalanithi

313. “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

314. “It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget.”

— Paul Kalanithi

315. “I had to help those families understand that the person they knew – the full, vital independent human – now lived only in the past and that I needed their input to understand what sort of future he or she would want: an easy death or to be strung between bags of fluids going in, others coming out, to persist despite being unable to struggle.”

— Paul Kalanithi

316. “It was only in practising medicine that I could pursue a serious biological philosophy. Moral speculation was puny compare to moral action.”

— Paul Kalanithi

317. “I began to see all disciplines as creating a vocabulary, a set of tools for understanding human life in a particular way.”

— Paul Kalanithi

318. “It also limits your energy... It is a tired hare who now races.”

— Paul Kalanithi

319. “The families who gather around their beloved – their beloved whose sheared heads contained battered brains – do not usually recognize the full significance, either. They see the past, the accumulation of memories, the freshly felt love, all represented by the body before them.”

— Paul Kalanithi

320. “Our relationship was still deep in meaning, a shared and evolving vocabulary about what mattered.”

— Paul Kalanithi

321. “Detailed statistics are for research halls, not hospital rooms... It is important to be accurate, but you must always leave some room for hope.”

— Paul Kalanithi

322. “Your right hand’s function to stop seizures? How much neurologic suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable? Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?”

— Paul Kalanithi

323. “I thought back to med school, when a patient had told me that she always wore her most expensive socks to the doctor’s office, so that when she was in a patient’s gown and shoeless, the doctor would see the socks and know she was a person of substance, to be treated with respect.”

— Paul Kalanithi

324. “Racking back pain can mold an identity; fatigue and nausea can, as well.”

— Paul Kalanithi

325. “And so it was literature that brought me back to life.”

— Paul Kalanithi

326. “In the midst of this endless barrage of head injuries, 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. I was not yet with patients in their pivotal moments, I was merely at those pivotal moments. I observed a lot of suffering; worse, I became inured to it.”

— Paul Kalanithi

327. “I felt that the last thing he needed was the obligation to service a new friendship.”

— Paul Kalanithi

328. “Grand illnesses are supposed to be life-clarifying.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

342. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

345. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

350. “How much neurologic suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable?”

— Paul Kalanithi