Paul Kalanithi Quotes
Top 68 wise famous quotes and sayings by Paul Kalanithi
Paul Kalanithi Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Paul Kalanithi on Wise Famous Quotes.
Neurosurgery requires a commitment to one's own excellence and a commitment to another's identity. The
How much neurologic suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable?
Maybe, in the absence of any certainty, we should just assume that we're going to live a long time. Maybe that's the only way forward.
there's that study that says doctors do a worse job prognosticating for patients they're personally invested in.
If time dilates when one moves at high speeds, does it contract when one moves barely at all? It must: the days have shortened considerably.
You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.
[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture - and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death.
Learning to judge whose lives could be saved, whose couldn't be, and whose shouldn't be requires an unattainable prognostic ability.
Literature not only illuminated another's experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection.
The MRI shows a mass in your brain, which is causing your symptoms." Silence. "Do you want to see the MRI?" "Yes." I
mind was simply the operation of the brain, an idea that struck me with force; it startled my naive understanding of the world
Mortal duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity, and so the duty to bear mortal responsibility pulled me back.
Always the seer is a sayer," Emerson wrote. "Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy.
At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living.
Looking out over the expanse ahead I saw not an empty wasteland but something simpler: a blank page on which I would go on.
Science, I had come to learn, is as political, competitive, and fierce a career as you can find, full of the temptation to find easy paths
The decision to operate at all involves an appraisal of one's own abilities, as well as a deep sense of who the patient is and what she holds dear.
Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation.
I got out of bed and took a step forward, repeating the phrase over and over: "I can't go on. I'll go on.
The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But
As a doctor, you have a sense of what it's like to be sick, but until you've gone through it yourself, you don't really know.
But my focus would have to be on my imminent role, intimately involved with the when and how of death - the grave digger with the forceps. Not
Few books I had read so directly and wholly addressed that fundamental fact of existence: all organisms, whether goldfish or grandchild, die.
Neurosurgery seemed to present the most challenging and direct confrontation with meaning, identity, and death.
Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving. Describing
A tureen of tragedy was best allotted by the spoonful. Only a few patients demanded the whole at once; most needed time to digest.
Cadaver dissection epitomizes, for many, the transformation of the somber, respectful student into the callous, arrogant doctor.
What are you most afraid or sad about?" she asked me one night as we were lying in bed.
"Leaving you," I told her.
"Leaving you," I told her.
I had traversed the line from doctor to patient, from actor to acted upon, from subject to direct object.
It's very easy to be number one; find the guy who is number one, and score one point higher than he does.
my imagined future and my personal identity collapsed, and I faced the same existential quandaries my patients faced.
And with that, the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.
Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including, alas, the one that says entropy always increases.
the heroic spirit of responsibility amid blood and failure. This struck me as the true image of a doctor.