When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

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?

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

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

Maybe, in the absence of any certainty, we should just assume that we’re going to live a long time.

Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.