Jaime Gibson

“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.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“It didn’t take much reading of the Bible though, to convince me that two wrongs would not make the situation any different, and that I couldn’t hate the white man, and at the same time hope to convert him.”
― Joy-Ann Reid, Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America

“The twilight existence of unconscious metabolism becomes an unbearable burden, usually left to an institution, where the family, unable to attain closure, visits with increasing rarity, until the inevitable fatal bedsore or pneumonia sets in. Some insist on this life and embrace its possibility, eyes open. But many do not, or cannot, and the neurosurgeon must learn to adjudicate.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air