241 Quotes by Paul Kalanithi

Still, when you work in a hospital, the papers you file aren't just papers: they are fragments of narratives filled with risks & triumphs.

When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man's days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

Why was I so authoritative in a surgeon's coat but so meek in a patient's gown?

I still had a lot of practical medicine to learn, but would knowledge alone be enough, with life and death hanging in the balance? Surely intelligence wasn't enough; moral clarity was needed as well. Somehow, I had to believe, I would gain not only knowledge but wisdom, too.

Literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.

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. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.

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

There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.

Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.