Whitney Sheng

“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

“I watched my city crumble on the BBC while my parents watched the local news. They were with the widows of firefighters and men holding pictures of missing fiancees. I was with the evenhanded political analysts and smug pundits. I was watching history on somebody else's channel, and in that moment I became, for them, slightly less American.”
― Elizabeth Bard, Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes

“Life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air