Status Updates From When Breath Becomes Air / B...

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.

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.

“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.”

“I knew I was going to die but I'd known that before. My state of knowledge was the same, but my ability to make lunch plans had been shot to hell.”

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on ”

„I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again.“