Jon Chen

“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.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Why not start figuring out ways to change the way we treat each other? The way we talk to each other, the way we talk about each other. To love each other. You know it starts off with self-love. We have to love ourselves before we can love anybody else.

And the media from day one, from when you were little ass kids, they teach you not to love yourself. They take something out of you and they try to sell it back to you... Something that you’ve been fighting for your entire life that’s taken from you as a child. That you always had inside of you. That’s self-love.

That's why I love you so much, cause as everybody knows, I love me so much.

The greatest gift you have is your now…you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow and the past is the past.”
― Kanye West

“I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. 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