My favorite quotes from When Breath Becomes Air

One of the better books I've read. A truly unique perspective that changed mine.

I read it last year and wanted to share my favorite excerpts. I aspire to write as well as Dr. Kalanithi did.

"He had reached some compromise in his mind that fatherhood could be distilled; short, concentrated (but sincere) bursts of high intensity could equal…whatever it was that other fathers did. All I knew was, if that was the price of medicine, it was simply too high."

"A word meant something only between people, and life's meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form."

"Even if you are perfect, the world isn't. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgement will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving."

"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."

"Not only that, but maybe the basic message of original sin isn't "Feel guilty all the time." Maybe it is more along these lines: "We all have a notion of what it means to be good, and we can't live up to it all the time."

"Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete."

"If time dilates when one moves at high speeds, does it contract when one moves barely at all? It must: the days have shortened considerably."

"Words have a longevity I do not."

"When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man's days with a sated joy, a joy unknown the me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing."

"Paul faced each stage of his illness with grace - not with bravado or a misguided faith that he would "overcome" or "beat" cancer but with an authenticity that allowed him to grieve the loss of the future he had planned and forge a new one."

"Because Paul is buried on the windward side of the mountains, I have visited him in the blazing sun, shrouding fog, and cold, stinging rain. It can be as uncomfortable as it is peaceful, both communal and lonely - like death, like grief - but there is beauty in all of it, and I think this is good and right."