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

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 ”

“Though I felt dissatisfied, at least I felt like somebody, a person, rather than a thing exemplifying the second law of thermodynamics (all order tends toward entropy, decay, etc.).”

“I had passed from the subject to the direct object of every sentence of my life. In fourteenth-century philosophy, the word patient simply meant "the object of an action," and I felt like one. As a doctor, I was an agent, a cause; as a patient, I was merely something to which things happened.”

“Is that what hope was? Could we divide the curve into existential sections, from "defeated" to "pessimistic" to "realistic" to
"hopeful" to "delusional"? Weren't the numbers just the numbers? Had we all just given in to the "hope" that every patient was above average?”

“Our patients lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn't. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients.
You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving”

“The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral re-
quirement.”