The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Paul Kalanithi

Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable.

Life, Nature, Science

What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide, but existential authenticity each person must find on her own… the angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.

Authenticity, Her, Find

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.

World, Relationships, Human

People react differently to hearing ‘Procedure X has a 70 percent chance of survival’ and ‘Procedure Y has a 30 percent chance of death.’ Phrased that way, people flock to Procedure X, even though the numbers are the same.

Death, Survival, People

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.

identity, responsibility

Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.

anatomy, guilt, morality, mortality, philosophy, sacred

mind was simply the operation of the brain, an idea that struck me with force; it startled my naive understanding of the world

As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives — everyone dies eventually — but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness.

death, doctor, illness, understanding

The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement.

excellence, failure

Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more pain¬ful?”Wouldn’t it be great if it did?’ I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteris¬tic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger without stripes. After so many years of living with death, I’d come to understand that the easiest death wasn’t necessarily the best. We talked it over. Our families gave their blessing. We decided to have a child. We would carry on living, instead of dying.

birth, death, suffering

[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture—and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death.

death, meaning, mortality

Often I return to the grave after leaving flowers – tulips, lilies, carnations – to find the heads eaten by deer. It’s just as good a use for the flowers as any, and one Paul would have liked. The earth is quickly turned over by worms, the processes of nature marching on, reminding me of what Paul saw and what I now carry deep in my bones, too: the inextricability of life and death, and the ability to cope, to find meaning despite this, because of this. What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy.

grave, meaning, natures-process