mily’s Reviews > When Breath Becomes Air > Status Update

“The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement. Good intentions were not enough, not when so much depended on my skills, when the difference between tragedy and triumph was defined by one or two millimeters.”

“…my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I'd experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she'd handed me the previous week.”

“And with that, the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.”