When Breath Becomes Air
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.
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
despondency.
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
Meaning, while a slippery concept, seemed inextricable from human relationships and moral values. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land resonated profoundly, relating meaninglessness and isolation, and the desperate quest for human connection.
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
If the weight of mortality does not grow lighter, does it at least get more familiar?
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything.
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
futurity: