When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

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

Already one of those books I know I’ll never be the same after reading it…

Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.

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.

When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

This book fundamentally changed me.