10 most insightful Quotes from when breath become Air

When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.

Good intentions were not enough, not when so much depended on my skills, when the difference between tragedy and triumph was defined by one or two millimeters.

The secret is to know that the deck is stacked […] and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.

Grand illnesses are supposed to be life-clarifying. Instead, I knew I was going to die—but I’d known that before. My state of knowledge was the same, but my ability to make lunch plans had been shot to hell.

Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past.

Knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living. 

Patients seek not scientific knowledge that doctors hide but existential authenticity each person must find on her own.

Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.