Top 350 Paul Kalanithi Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “How much neurologic suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable?”

— Paul Kalanithi

302. “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

303. “Did anyone tell you what the MRI showed?” I asked. “No.” The buck had been passed, as it often was with difficult news. Oftentimes, we’d have a spat with the oncologist over whose job it was to break the news.”

— Paul Kalanithi

304. “And along with shift work comes a kind of shiftiness, a subtle undercutting of responsibility.”

— Paul Kalanithi

305. “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

306. “It takes courage to be vulnerable.”

— Paul Kalanithi

307. “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

308. “Now more than ever, you have to be there for each other. I don’t want either of you staying up all night at the bedside or never leaving the hospital. Okay?” He.”

— Paul Kalanithi

309. “He wanted to help people understand death and face their mortality.”

— Paul Kalanithi

310. “The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”

— Paul Kalanithi

311. “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

312. “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

313. “Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease Natasha was suffering from.”

— Paul Kalanithi

314. “She was worried about it too. She was upset because I wasn’t talking to her about it. She was upset because I’d promised her one life, and given her another.”

— Paul Kalanithi

315. “Between these core passions and scientific theory, there will always be a gap. No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience.”

— Paul Kalanithi

316. “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

317. “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

318. “We are all reasonable people – revelation is not good enough. Even if God spoke to us, we’d discount it as delusional.”

— Paul Kalanithi

319. “My family engaged in a flurry of activity to transform my life from that of a doctor to that of a patient.”

— Paul Kalanithi

320. “The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement. Good intentions were not enough, not when the difference between tragedy and triumph was defined by one or two millimeters.”

— Paul Kalanithi

321. “She had done what I had challenged myself to do as a doctor years earlier: accepted mortal responsibility for my soul and returned me to a point where I could return to myself.”

— Paul Kalanithi

322. “And even though I no longer really knew what it was, I felt it: a drop of hope. The fog surrounding my life rolled back another inch, and a sliver of blue sky peeked through.”

— Paul Kalanithi

323. “Had I been more religious in my youth, I might have become a pastor, for it was the pastoral role I’d sought.”

— Paul Kalanithi

324. “My life up until my illness could be understood as the linear sum of my choices. As in most modern narratives, a character’s fate depended on human actions, his and others.”

— Paul Kalanithi

325. “My brain was fine, but I did not feel like myself. My body was frail and weak – the person who could run half marathons was a distant memory – and that, too, shapes your identity. Racking back pain can mold an identity; fatigue and nausea can, as well.”

— Paul Kalanithi

326. “The days when someone was simply “killed in a car accident” were long gone. Now those words opened a Pandora’s box, out of which emerged all the images: the roll of the gurney, the blood on the trauma bay floor, the tube shoved down her throat, the pounding on her chest.”

— Paul Kalanithi

327. “I spent the next year in classrooms in the English countryside, where I found myself increasingly often arguing that direct experience of life-and-death questions was essential to generating substantial moral opinions about them.”

— Paul Kalanithi

328. “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

329. “That Paul and I formed part of the deep meaning of each other’s lives is one of the greatest blessings that has ever come to me. Both.”

— Paul Kalanithi

330. “We carry with us the wonders, we seek without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies, wisely learns in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.”

— Paul Kalanithi

331. “A match flickers but does not light.”

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

333. “Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin; And breastless creatures under ground Leaned backward with a lipless grin. – T. S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality” I.”

— Paul Kalanithi

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

338. “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

339. “As a doctor, I was an agent, a cause; as a patient, I was merely something to which things happened.”

— Paul Kalanithi

340. “The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement. Good intentions were not enough, not when so much depended on my skills.”

— Paul Kalanithi

341. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

343. “After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I’d experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she’d handed me the previous week. Books.”

— Paul Kalanithi

344. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

346. “Some days, I simply persist.”

— Paul Kalanithi

347. “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

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi

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

— Paul Kalanithi