“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.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air
“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.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air
“Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air
“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 Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air
“That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when 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.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air
Tom’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Tom’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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