Reader > Reader's Quotes

“Be thankful that you got to feel that way about someone.
Be thankful for all of the mornings, and all of the nights, you got to wrap your limbs within theirs.
Be thankful for the way they cracked your heart open.
Be thankful for the way they challenged you and calmed you and made you believe in the person you were becoming.
Be thankful that you found this person, in a world of billions, and for a moment in time, even if it was fleeting, you got to dive into the soul of them.”
― Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder

“You do not have to vilify yourself for feeling,
and for caring, and for hoping that something beautiful you felt with another human being would turn into something real and tangible and pointed.”
― Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder

“Forgive yourself for the way you settled for less than what you wanted, or desired, or knew you needed, because you didn’t think you deserved it”
― Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder

“At the end of the day, nothing is more attractive than someone who stands firmly in front of you and chooses you.”
― Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder

“Don’t ever forget that the right people will choose you, they will see you, they will dive into the depth of you, and you will never have to force those connections.”
― Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder

“Sometimes, we hold on because we feel guilty, because we think that walking away and choosing ourselves is us discarding someone we care about, is us abandoning a human being.”
― Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder

“And sometimes, we hold on because we think that we will never find the kind of person who proves to us that love is not something that is meant to hurt.”
― Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder

“It is important to learn how to stop romanticizing the things in your life that hurt”
― Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder

“you cannot rob yourself of experience or
happiness or inspiration because you are scared of how you will be perceived.”
― Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder

“I hope you have the courage to never let comfort or apprehension convince you that you are better off staying still”
― Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder

“Forgive yourself for all of the things you didn’t say, or didn’t wear, or didn’t do because you were afraid of how it would make you look, because you were afraid of what others might think of you.”
― Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder

“But you cannot focus on the people who walked away, you cannot keep all of that hope alive inside of you. At the end of the day, if someone wants to be in your life, they will be. Truly— they are capable, they will make the effort, they will show up. If they do not — let that be your closure.”
― Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder

“We cannot control how long someone chooses to love us; we can not control how long someone chooses to stay. At the end of the day, all we can do is learn from the endings, all we can do is embrace the fact that for a moment in time, we felt something beautiful.”
― Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder

“The people who walk away from you because the timing is not right are simply just the people who are not willing to put the right amount of time into you. Let that be your closure.”
― Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder

“Because if there is one thing life has taught me, it is that love, genuine love, should never make you feel like you are too much, it should never make you feel like a difficult person
to care for. If there is one thing life has taught me, it is that love, worthwhile love, should never make you quiet your heartbeat, it should never be something you have to beg for.”
― Bianca Sparacino, A Gentle Reminder

“Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person ten times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“I told him I loved him,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “And he just said it wasn’t enough.” Her eyes were wide and bleak . “How am I supposed to live with that?”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“Time slowed, and stilled. It was just the two of us, me murmuring in the empty, sunlit room. Will didn't say much. He didn't answer back, or add a dry comment, or scoff. He nodded occasionally, his head pressed against mine, and murmured, or let out a small sound that could have been satisfaction at another good memory.
"It has been, the best six months of my entire life."
"Funnily enough, Clark, mine too."
And then, just like that, my heart broke. My face crumpled, my composure went and I held him tightly and I stopped caring that he could feel the shudder of my sobbing body because grief swamped me. It overwhelmed me and tore at my heart and my stomach and my head and it pulled me under, and I couldn't bear it.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“In anatomy lab, we objectified the dead, literally reducing them to organs, tissues, nerves, muscles. On that first day, you simply could not deny the humanity of the corpse. But by the time you'd skinned the limbs, sliced through inconvenient muscles, pulled out the lungs, cut open the heart and removed a lobe of the liver, it was hard to recognize this pile of tissue as human. 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, When Breath Becomes Air

“At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living. Would you trade your ability--or your mother's--to talk for a few extra months of mute life? The expansion of your visual blind spot in exchange for the small possibility of a fatal brain hemorrhage? Your right hand's function to stop seizures? How much neurological suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable? Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient, and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?" she asked. "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.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“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, When Breath Becomes Air

“This is not the end,” she said, a line she must have used a thousand times—after all, did I not use similar speeches to my own patients?—to those seeking impossible answers. “Or even the beginning of the end. This is just the end of the beginning.” And I felt better.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“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...The most obvious [response] might be an impulse to frantic
activity: to “live life to its fullest,” to travel, to dine, to achieve a host of neglected
ambitions. 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 a day.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I hope I’ll live long enough that she has some memory of me. Words have a longevity I do not. I had thought I could leave her a series of letters—but what would they say? I don’t
know what this girl will be like when she is fifteen; I don’t even know if she’ll take
to the nickname we’ve given her. 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.
That message is simple:
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
and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“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, When Breath Becomes Air

“I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It
never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and
gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it. Paul is gone, and I
miss him acutely nearly every moment, but I somehow feel I’m still taking part in the life we created together.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I know that often people create faulty narratives to make themselves feel better in the moment even though it makes them feel worse over time—and that sometimes, they need somebody else to read between the lines.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

“People often mistake numbness
for nothingness, but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to
being overwhelmed by too many feelings.”
― Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed