Ethan Kim > Ethan's Quotes

“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.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“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

“The God of Loss.
The God of Small Things.
He left no footprints in the sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Things can change in a day.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“You humans always think you’re destined for things, for tragedy or for greatness. Destiny is a myth. Destiny is the only myth. The gods choose nothing. You chose.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“If you are happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count? Estha asked. "Does what count?" "The happiness does it count?". She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff. Because the truth is, that only what counts, counts....."If you eat fish in a dream, does it count?" Does it mean you've eaten fish?”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.

And how much.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Immigrants, we get the job done.

(Acknowlegments)”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“The more gratification we found in our own geniuses, the more isolated we grew... And in this isolation, our creativity took on an aspect of compulsion.”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“It could be argued that death is inherently absurd, and that grinning is not necessarily an inappropriate response. I mean absurd in the sense of ridiculous, unreasonable. One second a person is there, the next they're not. Though perhaps Camus' definition of the absurd—that the universe is irrational and human life meaningless—applies here as well. [quoting from The Myth of Sisyphus: The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd.]”
― Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of–” I hesitated.

“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.

That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money–that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Amateurs obsess over strategy, Irjah had once told their class. Professionals obsess over logistics”
― R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― 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

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”
― 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 Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“When there is no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Words have a longevity I do not.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“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, When Breath Becomes Air

“What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I could either study meaning or I could experience it.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air