Words matter. These are the best Paul Kalanithi Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Had I been more religious in my youth, I might have become a pastor, for it was the pastoral role I’d sought.
The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient’s eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon’s diagnosis.
I have sat with countless patients and families to discuss grim prognoses: It’s one of the most important jobs physicians have. It’s easier when the patient is 94, in the last stages of dementia, and has a severe brain bleed. For young people like me – I am 36 – given a diagnosis of cancer, there aren’t many words.
The physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face – and make sense of – their own existence.
What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide, but existential authenticity each person must find on her own… the angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.
The good news is that I’ve already outlived two Brontes, Keats, and Stephen Crane. The bad news is that I haven’t written anything.
Words have a longevity that I do not have.
Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely.
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.
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.
While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons’ work is the crucible of identity. Every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves.
Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job – not a calling.
We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units.
