When Breath Becomes Air
The truth that you live one day at a time didn’t help: What was I supposed to do with that day?
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
The desert offered a pantheon
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
Books became my closest confidants, finely ground lenses providing new views of the world.
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
What kind of life exists without language?
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Montaigne, Frost, Greville, memoirs of cancer patients—anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality.
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But what I desired—life—was not what I was confident about—death. When I talked about hope, then, did I really mean “Leave some room for unfounded desire?”
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
The most obvious might be an impulse to frantic activity: to “live life to its fullest,” to travel, to dine, to achieve a host of neglected ambitions.
Paul Kalanithi • When Breath Becomes Air
it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. 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
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