Paul Kalanithi Quotes

It is so hard for us little human beings to accept this deal that we get. It's really crazy, isn't it? We get to live, then we have to die. ... What spirit human beings have! It is a pretty cheesy deal - all the pleasures of life, and then death.

In Mexico you have death very close. That's true for all human beings because it's a part of life, but in Mexico, death can be found in many things.

You realize mortality is everywhere.

Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

I was fascinated by mortality. Most people are, even if they don't admit it.

I think there is, in our society, there is a growing fear of death, a fear of the circumstances in which I might die, a fear I might be over-treated or under-treated. But fear is always a bad guide. Death is part of life.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

I've spent a lot of words on my own mortality.

In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.

There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.

I don’t know. We’ll all be dead.

You can't have living without dying.

Anyone can stop a man's life, but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it.

The partition separating life from death is so tenuous. The unbelievable fragility of our organism suggests a vision on a screen: a kind of mist condenses itself into a human shape, lasts a moment and scatters.

If millions are born millions must die.

As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence . . .

Death is our constant companion, and it is death that gives each person's life its true meaning.

Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death.

All our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death.

the brut first knows death when it dies, but man draws consciously nearer to it every hour that he lives; and this makes his life at times a questionable good even to him who has not recognised this character of constant anaihilation in the whole of life.

Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.

The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

We’re beings toward death, we’re … two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.