302 Quotes by Atul Gawande

Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self – which is absorbed in the moment – your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole.

Whatever the limits and travails we face, we want to retain the autonomy – the freedom – to be the authors of our lives.

And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?

We’re good at addressing specific, individual problems: colon cancer, high blood pressure, arthritic knees. Give us a disease, and we can do something about it. But give us an elderly woman with high blood pressure, arthritic knees, and various other ailments besides – an elderly woman at risk of losing the life she enjoys – and we hardly know what to do and often only make matters worse.

Culture is the sum total of shared habits and expectations.

I see it now – this world is swiftly passing. – the warrior Karna, in the Mahabharata.

Yet – and this is the painful paradox – we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.

We’ve divided the world into us versus them – an ever-shrinking population of good people against bad ones. But it’s not a dichotomy. People can be doers of good in many circumstances. And they can be doers of bad in others. It’s true of all of us. We are not sufficiently described by the best thing we have ever done, nor are we sufficiently described by the worst thing we have ever done. We are all of it.

Studies find that as people grow older they interact with fewer people and concentrate more on spending time with family and established friends. They focus on being rather than doing and on the present more than the future. Understanding.