Paul Kalanithi

She was upset because she had been worried about it, too. She was upset because I wasn’t talking to her about it. She was upset because I’d promised her one life, and given her another.

Was this a victory or a defeat?

defining characteristic of the organism is striving

It struck me that I had traversed the five stages of grief—the “Denial → Anger → Bargaining → Depression → Acceptance” cliché—but I had done it all backward.

problem, however, eventually became evident: to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning

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.

I was neither angry nor scared. It simply was. It was a fact about the world, like the distance from the sun to the earth.

Once again, I had traversed the line from doctor to patient, from actor to acted upon, from subject to direct object.

“This is not the end,”

“Or even the beginning of the end. This is just the end of the beginning.”