

“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. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air

“But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming 鈥渢he people鈥 has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible鈥攖his is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.”
― Between the World and Me
― Between the World and Me

“Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death -- it's something that happens to you and those around you. But Jeff and I had trained for years to actively engage with death, to grapple with it, like Jacob with the angel, and, in so doing, to confront the meaning of a life. We had assumed an onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility. Our patients' lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn't. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, 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.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air

“In fiction we say and recognize things about ourselves, which, for the sake of propriety, we ignore or don't talk about in reality.”
― La frantumaglia
― La frantumaglia

“You think that because you understand 鈥渙ne鈥 that you must therefore understand 鈥渢wo鈥 because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand 鈥渁nd.”
― Thinking in Systems: A Primer
― Thinking in Systems: A Primer
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