When Breath Becomes Air

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

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.

the mind was simply the operation of the brain

After I was caught returning at dawn from one such late-night escapade, my worried mother thoroughly interrogated me regarding every drug teenagers take, never suspecting that the most intoxicating thing I’d experienced, by far, was the volume of romantic poetry she’d handed me the previous week.

It was another country fact that if you killed a rattlesnake on your doorstep, its mate and offspring would come and make a permanent nest there, like Grendel’s mother seeking her revenge. So Jeevan and I drew straws: the lucky one grabbed a shovel, the unlucky one a pair of thick gardening gloves and a pillowcase, and through a seriocomic dance, we managed to get the snake into the pillowcase. Then, like an Olympic hammer thrower, I hurled the whole out into the desert, with plans to retrieve the pillowcase later that afternoon, so as not to get in trouble with our mother.

was leaving this small Arizona town in a few weeks, and I felt less like someone preparing to climb a career ladder than a buzzing electron about to achieve escape velocity, flinging out into a strange and sparkling universe.

Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas; one is for understanding language and the other for producing it.

First, detailed statistics are for research halls, not hospital rooms.

Complete removal could prevent that, but at the risk of damaging his hypothalamus, rendering him a slave to his appetites

The hypothalamus regulates our basic drives: sleep, hunger, thirst, sex.