When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

Nabokov, for his awareness of how our suffering can make us callous to the obvious suffering of another. Conrad, for his hypertuned sense of how miscommunication between people can so profoundly impact their lives.

If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?

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.

Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici: “With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but ’tis commonly no easy matter to get out of it.”

“One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second….Birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”

Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?

he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.

After so many years of living with death, I’d come to understand that the easiest death wasn’t necessarily the best.

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.

The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.

“We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can’t live up to it all the time.”

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.