When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.

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.

I had met her in a space where she was a person, instead of a problem to be solved.

A tureen of tragedy was best allotted by the spoonful.

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.

“Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?” “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.

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.

Graham Greene once said that life was lived in the first twenty years and the remainder was just reflection.

Crazy to say lol

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”