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.

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?

I don’t believe in the wisdom of children, nor in the wisdom of the old. 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.

Only later would I realize that our trip had added a new dimension to my understanding of the fact that brains give rise to our ability to form relationships and make life meaningful. Sometimes, they break.

Cadaver dissection is a medical rite of passage and a trespass on the sacrosanct, engendering a legion of feelings: from revulsion, exhilaration, nausea, frustration, and awe to, as time passes, the mere tedium of academic exercise. Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society’s most fundamental taboos, and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.