When Breath Becomes Air Quotes

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

“Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words.”
― Abraham Verghese

“I still had a lot of practical medicine to learn, but would knowledge alone be enough, with life and death hanging in the balance? Surely intelligence wasn't enough; moral clarity was needed as well. Somehow, I had to believe, I would gain not only knowledge but wisdom, too.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“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 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.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“As in most modern narratives, a character’s fate depended on human actions, his and others. King Lear’s Gloucester may complain about human fate as “flies to wanton boys,” but it’s Lear’s vanity that sets in motion the dramatic arc of the play. From the Enlightenment onward, the individual occupied center stage. But now I lived in a different world, a more ancient one, where human action paled against superhuman forces, a world that was more Greek tragedy than Shakespeare. No amount of effort can help Oedipus and his parents escape their fates; their only access to the forces controlling their lives is through the oracles and seers, those given divine vision. What I had come for was not a treatment plan—I had read enough to know the medical ways forward—but the comfort of oracular wisdom.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Yet there is dynamism in our house. Day to day, week to week, Cady blossoms: a first grasp, a first smile, a first laugh. Her pediatrician regularly records her growth on charts, tick marks indicating her progress over time. A brightening newness surrounds her. As she sits in my lap smiling, enthralled by my tuneless singing, an incandescence lights the room. 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. There are, I imagine, two responses to that realization. The most obvious 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. It is a tired hare who now races. And even if I had the energy, I prefer a more tortoiselike approach. I plod, I ponder. Some days, I simply persist. 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. With little to distinguish one day from the next, time has begun to feel static. In English, we use the word time in different ways: “The time is two forty-five” versus “I’m going through a tough time.” These days, time feels less like the ticking clock and more like a state of being. Languor settles in. There’s a feeling of openness. As a surgeon, focused on a patient in the OR, I might have found the position of the clock’s hands arbitrary, but I never thought them meaningless. Now the time of day means nothing, the day of the week scarcely more. Medical training is relentlessly future-oriented, all about delayed gratification; you’re always thinking about what you’ll be doing five years down the line. But now I don’t know what I’ll be doing five years down the line. I may be dead. I may not be. I may be healthy. I may be writing. I don't know. And so it's not all that useful to spend time thinking about the future - that is, beyond lunch.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Students no longer had to bring their own bodies, for starters, as they did in the nineteenth century. And medical schools had discontinued their support of the practice of robbing graves to procure cadavers - that looting itself a vast improvement over murder, a once common means enough to warrant its own verb: *burke*, which the OED defines as "to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or for the purpose of selling the victim's body for dissection.”
― Paul Kalanithi

“As a doctor, I knew not to declare “Cancer is a battle I’m going to win!” or ask “Why me?” (Answer: Why not me?)”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Yet I returned to the central values of Christianity—sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness—because I found them so compelling. 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. Not only that, but maybe the basic message of original sin isn’t “Feel guilty all the time.” Maybe it is more along these lines: “We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can’t live up to it all the time.” Maybe that’s what the message of the New Testament is, after all.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“then we all took time turns weeping, studying Paul’s face and each other’s with concern, steeped in the preciousness and pain of this time, our last hours all together. - Lucy Kalanithi”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Always the seer is a sayer,” Emerson wrote. “Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy.” Writing this book was a chance for this courageous seer to be a sayer, to teach us to face death with integrity. - Lucy Kalanithi”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The Servant Song” while standing side by side in a church pew, and the words vibrated with meaning as we faced uncertainty and pain together: “I will share your joy and sorrow / Till we’ve seen this journey through.” - Lucy Kalanithi”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Like a premature lung I felt unready for the responsibility of sustaining life.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air