When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

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?

No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, “Let there be light!” You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur.

The human brain has rendered the organism’s most basic task, reproduction, a treacherous affair. That same brain made things like labor and delivery units, cardiotocometers, epidurals, and emergency C-sections both possible and necessary.

“Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.

the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.

to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning—to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in.

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

maybe the basic message of original sin isn’t “Feel guilty all the time.” Maybe it is more along these lines: “We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can’t live up to it all the time.”

thought of our cozy bed empty at home, remembered falling in love in New Haven twelve years earlier, surprised right away by how well our bodies and limbs fit together, and thought of how ever since, we’d both slept best when entwined.

At home in bed a few weeks before he died, I asked him, “Can you breathe okay with my head on your chest like this?” His answer was “It’s the only way I know how to breathe.”

It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone,

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