Kalanithi Quotes & Sayings

I had to help those families understand that the person they knew - the full, vital independent human - now lived only in the past and that I needed their input to understand what sort of future he or she would want: an easy death or to be strung between bags of fluids going in, others coming out, — Paul Kalanithi

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

If boredom is, as Heidegger argued, the awareness of time passing, then surgery felt like the opposite: the intense focus made the arms of the clock seem arbitrarily placed. Two hours could feel like a minute. — Paul Kalanithi

I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I'd experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she'd handed me the previous week. Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world. In — Paul Kalanithi

I got out of bed and took a step forward, repeating the phrase over and over: "I can't go on. I'll go on. — Paul Kalanithi

At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living. — Paul Kalanithi

Maybe, in the absence of any certainty, we should just assume that we're going to live a long time. Maybe that's the only way forward. — Paul Kalanithi

And as I sat there, I realized that the questions intersecting life, death, and meaning, questions that all people face at some point, usually arise in a medical context. — Paul Kalanithi

This book carries the urgency of racing against time, of having important things to say. Paul confronted death - examined it, wrestled with it, accepted it - as a physician and a patient. He wanted to help people understand death and face their mortality. — Paul Kalanithi

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. — Paul Kalanithi

What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy. — Paul Kalanithi

How little do doctors understand the hells through which we put patients. — Paul Kalanithi

The mind was simply the operation of the brain. — Paul Kalanithi

A truculent vet refused the advice and coaxing of doctors, nurses, and physical therapists for weeks; as a result, his back wound broke down, just as we had warned him it would. Called out of the OR, I stitched the dehiscent wound as he yelped in pain, telling myself he'd had it coming.

Nobody has it coming. — Paul Kalanithi

I could either study meaning or I could experience it. After — Paul Kalanithi

Part of the cruelty of cancer, though, is not only that it limits your time; it also limits your energy, vastly reducing the amount you can squeeze into one day. — Paul Kalanithi

I was leaving this small Arizona town in a few weeks, and I felt less like someone preparing to climb a career ladder than a buzzing electron about to achieve escape velocity, flinging out into a strange and sparkling universe. — Paul Kalanithi

But my focus would have to be on my imminent role, intimately involved with the when and how of death - the grave digger with the forceps. Not — Paul Kalanithi

Openness to human relationality does not mean revealing grand truths from the apse; it means meeting patients where they are, in the narthex or nave, and bringing them as far as you can. — Paul Kalanithi

The funny thing about time in the OR, whether you race frenetically or proceed steadily, is that you have no sense of it passing. If boredom is, as Heidegger argued, the awareness of time passing, then surgery felt like the opposite: the intense focus made the arms of the clock seem arbitrarily placed. — Paul Kalanithi

Even while terminally ill, Paul was fully alive; despite physical collapse, he remained vigorous, open, full of hope not for an unlikely cure but for days that were full of purpose and meaning. — Paul Kalanithi

One chapter of my life seemed to have ended; perhaps the whole book was closing. Instead of being the pastoral figure aiding a life transition, I found myself the sheep, lost and confused. Severe illness wasn't life-altering, it was life-shattering. — Paul Kalanithi

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. — Paul Kalanithi

Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue. Between — Paul Kalanithi

Few books I had read so directly and wholly addressed that fundamental fact of existence: all organisms, whether goldfish or grandchild, die. — Paul Kalanithi

Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito. — Paul Kalanithi

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. — Paul Kalanithi

Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward. And so it was literature that brought. — Paul Kalanithi

Learning to judge whose lives could be saved, whose couldn't be, and whose shouldn't be requires an unattainable prognostic ability. — Paul Kalanithi

As graduation loomed, I had a nagging sense that there was still far too much unresolved for me, that I wasn't done studying. I applied for a master's in English literature at Stanford and was accepted into the program. I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life's meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans - i.e., "human relationality" - that undergirded meaning. Yet somehow, this process existed in brains and bodies, subject to their own physiologic imperatives, prone to breaking and failing. There must be a way, I thought, that the language of life as experienced - of passion, of hunger, of love - bore some relationship, however convoluted, to the language of neurons, digestive tracts, and heartbeats. At Stanford, I had the good — Paul Kalanithi

Time for me is now double-edged: every day brings me further from the low of my last relapse but closer to the next recurrence - and, eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire. — Paul Kalanithi

Paul faced each stage of his illness with grace - not with bravado or a misguided faith that he would "overcome" or "beat" cancer but with an authenticity that allowed him to grieve the loss of the future he had planned and forge a new one. — Paul Kalanithi

A scan showed that a benign brain tumor was pressing on her right frontal lobe. In terms of operative risk, it was the best kind of tumor to have, and the best place to have it; surgery would almost certainly eliminate her seizures. The alternative was a lifetime on toxic antiseizure medications. — Paul Kalanithi

Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation. — Paul Kalanithi

all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can't live up to it all the time. — Paul Kalanithi

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. — Paul Kalanithi

Always the seer is a sayer," Emerson wrote. "Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy. — Paul Kalanithi

Standing at the crossroads where I should have been able to see and follow the footprints of the countless patients I had treated over the years, I saw instead only a blank, a harsh, vacant, gleaming white desert, as if a sandstorm had erased all trace of familiarity. — Paul Kalanithi

I don't believe in the wisdom of children, nor in the wisdom of the old. There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of the living. We are never so wise as when we live in the moment. — Paul Kalanithi

Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. — Paul Kalanithi

The decision to operate at all involves an appraisal of one's own abilities, as well as a deep sense of who the patient is and what she holds dear. — Paul Kalanithi

The MRI shows a mass in your brain, which is causing your symptoms." Silence. "Do you want to see the MRI?" "Yes." I — Paul Kalanithi

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. — Paul Kalanithi

You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving. — Paul Kalanithi

mind was simply the operation of the brain, an idea that struck me with force; it startled my naive understanding of the world — Paul Kalanithi

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. — Paul Kalanithi

Some days, I simply persist. — Paul Kalanithi

When there is no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon's only tool. — Paul Kalanithi

There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And the New Testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing, and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time. — Paul Kalanithi

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. — Paul Kalanithi

Dying in one's fourth decade is unusual now, but dying is not. "The thing about lung cancer is that it's not exotic," Paul wrote in an email to his best friend, Robin. "The reader can get into these shoes, walk a bit, and say, 'So that's what it looks like from here. Sooner or later, I'll be back here in my own shoes.' That's what I'm aiming for, I think. Not the sensationalism of dying and not the exhortations to gather rosebuds but: Here's what lies up ahead on the road." Of course, he did more than just describe the terrain. He traversed it bravely. — Paul Kalanithi

People often ask if it is a calling, and my answer is always yes. You can;t see it as a job, because if it's a job, it's one of the worst jobs there is. — Paul Kalanithi

I was making the decision to do this work because this work, to me, was a sacred thing.) Lucy — Paul Kalanithi

I had traversed the line from doctor to patient, from actor to acted upon, from subject to direct object. — Paul Kalanithi

Mortal duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity, and so the duty to bear mortal responsibility pulled me back. — Paul Kalanithi

to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning - to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That — Paul Kalanithi

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.) As — Paul Kalanithi

He, uh - he apparently had a difficult complication, and his patient died. Last night he climbed onto the roof of a building and jumped off. I don't really know anything else." I searched for a question to bring understanding. None was forthcoming. I could only imagine the overwhelming guilt, like a tidal wave, that had lifted him up and off that building. — Paul Kalanithi

Doctors, it turns out, need hope, too. — Paul Kalanithi

A word meant something only between people, and life's meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans that undergirded meaning. — Paul Kalanithi

The problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning - to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That's not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God. It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn't have any. In other words, existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge. Yet — Paul Kalanithi

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. — Paul Kalanithi

Over the last six years, I'd examined scores of such scans, on the off chance that some procedure might benefit the patient. But this scan was different: it was my own. I — Paul Kalanithi

The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But — Paul Kalanithi

In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. 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. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them, where, — Paul Kalanithi

After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I'd experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she'd handed me the previous week. Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world. — Paul Kalanithi

Cadaver dissection epitomizes, for many, the transformation of the somber, respectful student into the callous, arrogant doctor. — Paul Kalanithi

If the hare makes too many missteps and has to keep adjusting, the tortoise wins. If the tortoise spends too much time planning each step, the hare wins. — Paul Kalanithi

Struggle toward the capital-T Truth, but recognize that the task is impossible - or that if a correct answer is possible, verification certainly is impossible.
In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. 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. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them, where, as at the end of that Sunday's reading;
the sower and reaper can rejoice together. For here the saying is verified that "One sows and another reaps." I sent you to reap what you have not worked for; others have done the work, and you are sharing the fruits of their work. — Paul Kalanithi

But in residency, something else was gradually unfolding. In the midst of this endless barrage of head injuries, I began to suspect that being so close to the fiery light of such moments only blinded me to their nature, like trying to learn astronomy by staring directly at the sun. I was not yet with patients in their pivotal moments, I was merely at those pivotal moments. I observed a lot of suffering; worse, I became inured to it. Drowning, even in blood, one adapts, learns to float, to swim, even to enjoy life, bonding with the nurses, doctors, and others who are clinging to the same raft, caught in the same tide. My — Paul Kalanithi

Where did biology, morality, literature, and philosophy intersect? — Paul Kalanithi

Doctors in highly charged fields met patients at inflected moments, the most authentic moments, where life and identity were under threat; their duty included learning what made that particular patient's life worth living, and planning to save those things if possible--or to allow the peace of death if not. Such power required deep responsibility, sharing in guilt and recrimination. — Paul Kalanithi

a family will visit constantly, daily or even twice a day. Then maybe every other day. Then just weekends. After months or years, the visits taper off, until it's just, say, birthdays and Christmas. Eventually, most families move away, as far as they can get. — Paul Kalanithi

Sometimes the news so shocks the mind that the brain suffers an electrical short. This phenomenon is known as a "psychogenic" syndrome, a severe version of the swoon some experience after hearing bad news. — Paul Kalanithi

Even if you are perfect, the world isn't. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win... — Paul Kalanithi

Existential claims have no weight; all knowledge is scientific knowledge. Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. — Paul Kalanithi

If time dilates when one moves at high speeds, does it contract when one moves barely at all? It must: the days have shortened considerably. — Paul Kalanithi

[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture - and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death. — Paul Kalanithi

I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life's meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. — Paul Kalanithi

A tureen of tragedy was best allotted by the spoonful. Only a few patients demanded the whole at once; most needed time to digest. — Paul Kalanithi

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. — Paul Kalanithi

If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. - Michel de Montaigne, "That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die — Paul Kalanithi

This was summer at Sierra Camp, perhaps no different from — Paul Kalanithi

Graham Greene once said that life was lived in the first twenty years and the remainder was just reflection. So — Paul Kalanithi

The curse of cancer created a strange and strained existence, challenging me to be neither blind to, nor bound by, death's approach. Even when the cancer was in retreat, it cast long shadows. When — Paul Kalanithi

If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining? — Paul Kalanithi

Do you think my life has meaning? Did I make the right choices? — Paul Kalanithi

values of Christianity - sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness - because — Paul Kalanithi

The morning commuters began to animate the distant South Lake Tahoe roads. But craning your head back, you could see the day's blue darken halfway across the sky, and to the west, the night remained yet unconquered - pitch-black, stars in full glimmer, the full moon still pinned in the sky. To the east, the full light of day beamed toward you; to the west, night reigned with no hint of surrender. No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, "Let there be light!" You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur. — Paul Kalanithi

When I was a med student, the first patient I met with this sort of problem was a sixty-two-year-old man with a brain tumor. We strolled into his room on morning rounds, and the resident asked him, "Mr. Michaels, how are you feeling today?" "Four six one eight nineteen!" he replied, somewhat affably. 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 and fury. The team prepared to leave the room; for some reason, I lingered. "Fourteen one two eight," he pleaded with me, holding my hand. "Fourteen one two eight." "I'm sorry." "Fourteen one two eight," he said mournfully, staring into my eyes. And then I left to catch up to the team. He died a few months later, buried with whatever message he had for the world. — Paul Kalanithi

What kind of life exists without language? — Paul Kalanithi

Before operating on a patient's brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. — Paul Kalanithi

Out of his pen he was spinning gold. — Paul Kalanithi

Even in having children in this new life, death played its part. — Paul Kalanithi

(Alexander Pope: "A little learning is a dangerous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.") — Paul Kalanithi

My brain was fine, but I did not feel like myself. My body was frail and weak - the person who could run half marathons was a distant memory - and that, too, shapes your identity. Racking back pain can mold an identity; fatigue and nausea can, as well. — Paul Kalanithi

It's easier when the patient is ninety-four, in the last stages of dementia, with a severe brain bleed. But for someone like me - a thirty-six-year-old given a diagnosis of terminal cancer - there aren't really words. — Paul Kalanithi

Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing — Paul Kalanithi

remember the moment when my overwhelming unease yielded, when that seemingly impassable sea of uncertainty parted. I woke up in pain, facing another day - no project beyond breakfast seemed tenable. I can't go on, I thought, and immediately, its antiphon responded, completing Samuel Beckett's seven words, words I had learned long ago as an undergraduate: I'll go on. I got out of bed and took a step forward, repeating the phrase over and over: "I can't go on. I'll go on." That — Paul Kalanithi

Yes, I thought, and therein was the paradox: like a runner crossing the finish line only to collapse, without that duty to care for the ill pushing me forward, I became an invalid — Paul Kalanithi