Quotes from Arthur Kleinman

Hope is what makes the human condition liveable

We tend to think of dangers and uncertainties as anomalies in the continuum of life, or irruptions of unpredictable forces into a largely predictable world. I suggest the contrary: that dangers and uncertainties are an inescapable dimension of life. In fact, as we shall come to understand, they make life matter. They define what it means to be human.

Yet when the denial becomes so complete that we live under what amounts to a tyranny of not seeing and not speaking the existential truth, it becomes dangerous itself. This is what makes the closest and deepest experiences of catastrophe, loss, and failure so

The most important thing offered by a caregiver is simply their complete presence