Top 25 Quotes by Paul Kalanithi

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.

Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

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.

The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing... You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months later, you may want to learn to play the saxophone or devote yourself to the church. Death may be a one-time event, but living with terminal illness is a process.

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.

I have sat with countless patients and families to discuss grim prognoses: It's one of the most important jobs physicians have. It's easier when the patient is 94, in the last stages of dementia, and has a severe brain bleed. For young people like me - I am 36 - given a diagnosis of cancer, there aren't many words.

Time for me is double-edged: every day brings me further from the low of my last cancer relapse, but every day also brings me closer to the next cancer recurrence - and eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire.