Paul Kalanithi Quotes

There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.

Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death.

Of all living things, only humans consciously anticipate death; the consequent need to choose how to behave in its face - to worry about how to die - distinguishes us from other animals. The need to manage death is the particular lot of humanity.

I first started asking big questions when I was 12, and by big questions, I mean, 'Why are we here? What is this business? We're alive for a few short decades and then poof, we're out of here.'

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being; the difference between sanity and insanity; the meaning of life and death; what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

If you don't ponder the end of the world on a regular basis, I don't think you're really human.

From the very early days of seeing patients, I noticed that many of them seemed to be concerned with issues of their mortality, and so the philosophy training I had taken began to seem rather important to me.

Horror, almost better than any of the other genres, pits the will to live against the will toward nihilism. I just think that's worth exploring. I don't know what is more important, actually, to explore than that very dynamic.

A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

Thus, I always began by assuming the worst; my appeal was dismissed. That meant, of course, I was to die. Sooner than others, obviously. 'But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.' And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten-- since, in either case, other men will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably.

I always thought that as long as man is mortal, he will never be relaxed.

I can see where creation often stops while the body still lives and often does not care to. the death of life before life dies.

One idea I explore in my stand-up show is whether, if you try looking at the universe rationally and avoid coping mechanisms like mysticism or religion, you can still be happy knowing you are going to die after a brief time on this spinning ball.

I think life's an irrational obsession.

One must either take an interest in the human situation or else parade before the void.

I've been running from, and toward, death all my life, more aware of it than a person should be.

Life begins when a person first realizes how soon it will end.

The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence.

There's not a higher stake than someone having to face their own death.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.