241 Quotes by Paul Kalanithi

And so it was literature that brought me back to life.

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.

Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other in the world, and still, it is never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them, where, as at the end of that Sunday’s reading, where the sower and reaper can rejoice together

I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.

The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time. Not only that, but 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.

Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?''Wouldn't it be great if it did?' I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.

The tumor had interrupted his speech circuitry, so he could speak only in streams of numbers, but he still had prosody, he could still emote: smile, scowl, sigh. He recited another series of numbers, this time with urgency. There was something he wanted to tell us, but the digits could communicate nothing other than his fear & fury. 

We each joked to close friends that the secret to saving a relationship is for one person to become terminally ill. Conversely, we knew that one trick to managing a terminal illness is to be deeply in love—to be vulnerable, kind, generous, grateful.

What are you most afraid or sad about?" she asked me one night as we were lying in bed."Leaving you," I told her.