Breath is something we take for granted. But without breath, we would die. In fact, breathing is the process of taking in air and using it to sustain life. Breath is also an essential part of consciousness.
When breath becomes air, author Paul Kalanithi realizes that he’s living one day at a time and that he can’t control what will happen tomorrow.
Kalanithi’s experience shows us how precious each moment is and reminds us to savor the present.
When Breath Becomes Air Quotes
“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi
“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.”
― Paul Kalanithi
“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 when we live in this moment.”
― Paul Kalanithi
“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.”
― Paul Kalanithi
“I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”
― Paul Kalanithi
“The main message of Jesus, I believed, is that mercy trumps justice every time.”
― Paul Kalanithi
“even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.”
― Paul Kalanithi
“Years ago, it had occurred to me that Darwin and Nietzsche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.”
― 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.”
― Paul Kalanith
“Life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.”
― Paul Kalanithi
“If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”
― Paul Kalanithi
“Grand illnesses are supposed to be life-clarifying. Instead, I knew I was going to die—but I’d known that before. My state of knowledge was the same, but my ability to make lunch plans had been shot to hell. The way forward would seem obvious, if only I knew how many months or years I had left. Tell me three months, I’d spend time with family. Tell me one year, I’d write a book. Give me ten years, I’d get back to treating diseases. The truth that you live one day at a time didn’t help: What was I supposed to do with that day?”
― Paul Kalanithi
“Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life.”
― Paul Kalanithi
“Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.”
― Paul Kalanithi
“I will share your joy and sorrow / Till we’ve seen this journey through.”
― Paul Kalanithi
“I don’t 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 when we live in the moment.”
― Paul Kalanithi
“I expected to feel only empty and heartbroken after Paul died. It never occurred to me that you could love someone the same way after he was gone, that I would continue to feel such love and gratitude alongside the terrible sorrow, the grief so heavy that at times I shiver and moan under the weight of it.”
― Paul Kalanithi
“Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”
― Paul Kalanithi
“Bereavement is not the truncation of married love,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “but one of its regular phases—like the honeymoon.”
― Paul Kalanithi
“We shall rise insensibly, and reach the tops of the everlasting hills, where the winds are cool and the sight is glorious.”
― Paul Kalanithi
Conclusion
When Breath Becomes Air is an excellent book that provides readers with an intimate glimpse into the life of a dying man. Although Paul Kalanithi’s story is heartbreaking, it is also inspiring, and his words offer hope and insight to those who are facing their own mortality. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a powerful and moving read.
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