{"author":"Paul Kalanithi","author_id":"Paul+Kalanithi","total_quotes":32,"quotes":[{"text":"Before operating on a patient's brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another's cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.","author":"Paul Kalanithi","tags":["identity","responsibility"],"id":3837,"author_id":"Paul+Kalanithi"},{"text":"After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I’d experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she’d handed me the previous week. Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world.","author":"Paul Kalanithi","tags":["inspirational","life-philosophy","love-of-books","poetry"],"id":15331,"author_id":"Paul+Kalanithi"},{"text":"Will having a newborn distract from the time we have together?' she asked. 'Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more pain¬ful?''Wouldn't it be great if it did?' I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering. Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteris¬tic of the organism is striving. Describing life otherwise was like painting a tiger without stripes. After so many years of living with death, I'd come to understand that the easiest death wasn't necessarily the best. We talked it over. Our families gave their blessing. We decided to have a child. We would carry on living, instead of dying.","author":"Paul Kalanithi","tags":["birth","death","suffering"],"id":17685,"author_id":"Paul+Kalanithi"},{"text":"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.","author":"Paul Kalanithi","tags":["authenticity","her","find "],"id":22635,"author_id":"Paul+Kalanithi"},{"text":"Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.","author":"Paul Kalanithi","tags":["anatomy","guilt","morality","mortality","philosophy","sacred"],"id":63926,"author_id":"Paul+Kalanithi"},{"text":"Literature not only illuminated another's experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection.","author":"Paul Kalanithi","tags":["literature"],"id":64248,"author_id":"Paul+Kalanithi"},{"text":"[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture—and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death.","author":"Paul Kalanithi","tags":["death","meaning","mortality"],"id":78983,"author_id":"Paul+Kalanithi"},{"text":"Mind was simply the operation of the brain, an idea that struck me with force; it startled my naive understanding of the world.","author":"Paul Kalanithi","tags":["thinking"],"id":143312,"author_id":"Paul+Kalanithi"},{"text":"There is a tension in the Bible between justice and mercy, between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And the New Testament says you can never be good enough: goodness is the thing, and you can never live up to it. The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.","author":"Paul Kalanithi","tags":["love","mercy"],"id":172562,"author_id":"Paul+Kalanithi"},{"text":"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.","author":"Paul Kalanithi","tags":["cadavers","dissection","dissonance","doctors","health","medical-students","medicine"],"id":189195,"author_id":"Paul+Kalanithi"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":32,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}