Paul Kalanithi Quotes

When they told me I had cancer, I thought I was going to die.

We all live in this little bubble that we just expect to live forever and I think those of us that have been with people battling cancer, you realise, actually, this surrounds us everywhere we go.

I am not an expert on time, or on cancer, or on life itself.

Only the dying man can tell how much time he has left.

In Khmer we have a saying that when one is both quite sick and old there remains only one thing, that you die.

I have been unexpectedly confronted with my own mortality as I was told that I had cancer.

Dementia is quite unlike cancer or heart disease or any of those other conditions where you bargain with God for a cure or even just a bit more time.

Medicine is a very tough thing. I mean, everyone is going to die. Sooner or later. That's a tough thing to face.

You don't have free will when you have lung cancer.

I think I definitely got scared by the second or third time a doctor told me I was dying.

Our initial assessment is that they will all die.

I realized not long ago that by the time I leave this Earth, no matter when it is I will have officially only spent approximately 14 years of my life where I did not have to deal with cancer.

I think some people do want to die, and they will get a disease. There are people who know their lives are so troubled, and their bodies are getting them out of here.

AIDS killed him, but our health care system tortured him.

It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.

"I'm going over the valley." (Dying from throat cancer, his doctor found him wandering around his room, asked him where was he going?)

Time rushes towards us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.

And in bed, deep inside the building, are all the headaches that won't go away. The failed kidneys, the rashes, the ragged-edged moles, the lumps on the breast, the coughs that have turned nasty. In the Marie Curie Ward on the fourth floor are the kids with cancer. Their bodies secretly and slowly being consumed. And then there's the mortuary, where the dead lie in refrigerated drawers with name tags on their feet.

Death is better than disease.

We are all terminal.

My doctor gave me six months to live, but when I couldn't pay the bill he gave me six months more.

When you go through a long illness, certainly one of cancer, there's a certain release from it and relief that it has come to an end, because the suffering can be unbearable, as opposed to an abrupt stop to life when they go out the door and there's a loved one who never comes home because of some accident.

If you ask me if I think I will be sober in 24 hours time I can say yes, but in two years I can't tell you. I could be dead.

I know I am at the end. I shall never get better, dear.

Less than 1 percent of the patients treated are alive at the end of five years.