Highly recommended.
I dont believe in the wisdom of children , nor in the wisdom of the old. There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as we live in this moment
- pg 35.
With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but 'ts is commonly no easy matter to get out of it - pg 53.
Our patients life and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect , the world isnt .The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgeent will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. - pg 115.
The call to protect life -- and not merely life but another's identify; its perhaps not too much to say another's soul -- was obvious in its sacredness - pg 98.
Transition once cancer is diagnosed.
One chapter of my life ended perhaps the whole book was closing. Instead of being the pastoral figure aiding a life transition, I found myself being the sheep, lost and confused - pg 120.
My carefully planned and hard-won future no longer existed - pg 120.
I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing & everything...The fact of death is unsettling, yet there is no other way to live.
'Dont you think saying goodbye to your chiled make your death more painful? '..'Wouldnt it be great if it did ?' Lucy and I both felt that lifewasnt about avoiding suffering - pg 143.
Even if I'm dying , until I actually die, I am still living - pg 150.
On science and religion
Science may provide he 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 ,beauty ,envy ,honor, weakness. No system of thought can contain the fullness of human experience - pg 170.
message of Jesus.
The main message of Jesus, I believe, is tat mercy trumps justice every time - pg 171.
My life until my illness could be understood as the linear sum of my choices, now I lived in another world ..where human action paled against super human forces.
Dr. Kalanithi's letter to his daughter:
When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself,..what you have 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 to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunder for more and more but rests, satisfied. - pg 199
A poem quoted by Dr.Lucy Kalanithi.
"You left me, sweet , two legacies, --
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content ,
Had He the offer of;
You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me. "
- Emily Dickinson .
'Always the seer is a sayer' Emerson wrote, 'somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy'.
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