When Breath Becomes Air

Dr. Paul Kalanithi describes his transformation from a medical student into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

Favorite quotes from the book:

You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.

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.

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.

That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man's days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.