241 Quotes by Paul Kalanithi

Suffering can make us callous to the obvious suffering of another.

As a doctor, you have a sense of what it’s like to be sick, but until you’ve gone through it yourself, you don’t really know... when you get an IV placed, for example, you can actually taste the salt when they start infusing it. They tell me that this happens to everybody, but even after eleven years in medicine, I had never known.

What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?

I had started in this career, in part, to pursue death: to grasp it, uncloak it, and see it eye-to-eye, unblinking.

But knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.

She was upset because I’d promised her one life, and given her another.

Only later would I realize that our trip had added a new dimension to my understanding of the fact that brains give rise to our ability to form relationships and make life meaningful. Sometimes, they break.

This is not the end,” she said, a line she must have used a thousand times – after all, did I not use similar speeches to my own patients? – to those seeking impossible answers. “Or even the beginning of the end. This is just the end of the beginning.” And I felt better.

Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present.