Paul Kalanithi

“One sows and another reaps.”

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.

Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

pain that made me forsake speech to grind my teeth

And with that, the future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated.

felt less like someone preparing to climb a career ladder than a buzzing electron about to achieve escape velocity

I knew medicine only by its absence

Brave New World

the most intoxicating thing I’d experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry

happiness was not the point of life