Human knowledge is never contained in just one person.
What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain.
Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including alas, the one that says entropy always increases. Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation.
Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection
Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job- not a calling.
A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form.
People often ask if it was calling. My answer always is yes.
Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job– not a calling.
[H]e found poetry more comforting than Scripture—and his ability to forge from his life a cogent, powerful tale of living with death.
The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement.
As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives — everyone dies eventually — but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness.
mind was simply the operation of the brain, an idea that struck me with force; it startled my naive understanding of the world
Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society’s most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.
Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?””Wouldn’t it be great if it did?” I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn’t about avoiding suffering.
Time for me is now double-edged: every day brings me further from the low of my last relapse but closer to the next recurrence – and, eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire.
People react differently to hearing ‘Procedure X has a 70 percent chance of survival’ and ‘Procedure Y has a 30 percent chance of death.’ Phrased that way, people flock to Procedure X, even though the numbers are the same.
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.
What patients seek is not scientific knowledge that doctors hide, but existential authenticity each person must find on her own… the angst of facing mortality has no remedy in probability.