Elizebeth Thomas > Elizebeth's Quotes

“I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. 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. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“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, When Breath Becomes Air

“Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“There must be a way, I thought, that 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.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air