“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.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air
“After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we’ve just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.”
― A Gentleman in Moscow
― A Gentleman in Moscow
“Don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it. The call to protect life—and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul—was obvious in its sacredness. 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. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air
“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air
“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.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air
Anna’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Anna’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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Favorite Genres
Classics, Contemporary, Crime, Fantasy, Fiction, Mystery, Poetry, Psychology, Science fiction, Suspense, Thriller, Travel, and Young-adult
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