When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.

it would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.

Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.

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.

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.

Doctors, it turns out, need hope, too.

Although these last few years have been wrenching and difficult—sometimes almost impossible—they have also been the most beautiful and profound of my life, requiring the daily act of holding life and death, joy and pain in balance and exploring new depths of gratitude and love.