Paul Kalanithi

She was upset because she had been worried about it, too. She was upset because I wasn’t talking to her about it. She was upset because I’d promised her one life, and given her another.

would mean letting my friends go to New York, to continue deepening those relationships, without me. It would mean setting aside literature. But it would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.

Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried them.

scalpel is so sharp it doesn’t so much cut the skin as unzip it, revealing the hidden and forbidden sinew beneath, and despite your preparation, you are caught unawares, ashamed and excited

Her capacity to love was barely finite

that one passage so perfectly illuminated the ways in which the personal, medical, and spiritual all intermingled

With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but ’tis

commonly no easy matter to get out of it

was pursuing medicine to bear witness to the twinned mysteries of death, its experiential and biological manifestations: at once deeply personal and utterly impersonal.

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