Had I been more religious in my youth, I might have become a pastor, for it was the pastoral role I’d sought. Paul Kalanithi Read Quote
I had spent so much time studying literature at Stanford and the history of medicine at Cambridge in an attempt to better understand the particularities of death, only to come away feeling like they were still unknowable to me. Paul Kalanithi Read Quote
People react differently to hearing ‘Procedure X has a 70 percent chance of survival’ and ‘Procedure Y has a 30 percent chance of death.’ Phrased that way, people flock to Procedure X, even though the numbers are the same. Paul Kalanithi Read Quote
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. Paul Kalanithi Read Quote
What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide, but existential authenticity each person must find on her own… the angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability. Paul Kalanithi Read Quote
During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely, enlightened reason offered a more coherent cosmos. Surely, Occam’s razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God. Paul Kalanithi Read Quote
The diagnosis was immediate: Masses matting the lungs and deforming the spine. Cancer. In my neurosurgical training, I had reviewed hundreds of scans for fellow doctors to see if surgery offered any hope. I’d scribble in the chart ‘Widely metastatic disease – no role for surgery,’ and move on. But this scan was different: It was my own. Paul Kalanithi Read Quote
I knew medicine only by its absence – specifically, the absence of a father growing up: one who went to work before dawn and returned in the dark to a plate of reheated dinner. Paul Kalanithi Read Quote
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. Paul Kalanithi Read Quote
