241 Quotes by Paul Kalanithi

We shall rise insensibly, and reach the tops of the everlasting hills, where the winds are cool and the sight is glorious.

Any major illness transforms a patient’s – really, an entire family’s – life.

Looking out over the expanse ahead I saw not an empty wasteland but something simpler: a blank page on which I would go on.

Indeed, this is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But that’s the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job – not a calling.

I was driven less by achievement than by trying to understand, in earnest: What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.

I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.

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.

He knew he would never be alone, never suffer unnecessarily. 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 the only way I know how to breathe.” 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.

At moments, the weight of it all became palpable. It was in the air, the stress and misery. Normally, you breathed it in, without noticing it. But some days, like a humid muggy day, it had a suffocating weight of its own. Some days, this is how it felt when I was in the hospital: trapped in an endless jungle summer, wet with sweat, the rain of tears of the families of the dying pouring down.