Oliver Sacks

“I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know.”

“I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life—achieving a sense of peace within oneself.”

“In this, then, lies their power of understanding--understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic. Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for those wordless but immensely sensitive patients. It was to these (for them) most glaring, even grotesque, incongruities and improprieties that my aphasic patients responded, undeceived and undeceivable by words.This is why they laughed at the President's speech.”

“I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.”

“With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while they're going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing - in perception - have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity; this does not happen with imagination.”

“Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”

“כל אחד מאיתנו ניחן במוח עם כוחות ומגבלות ייחודיים משלו, לכל אחד יש הדרך הייחודית שלו ללכת בה. אל תשאף להיות מישהו אחר, אל תקנא באחרים. מה שיש לך הוא טוב מספיק.”

“במהלך כל חיי, כתבתי מיליוני מילים, אולם פעולת הכתיבה נדמת רעננה ומענגת כפי שהייתה בתחילה לפני כמעט שבעים שנה.”

“פעולת הכתיבה מספקת כשלעצמה; היא מבהירה את מחשבותיי ורגשותיי. פעולת הכתיבה היא חלק אינטגרלי מחיי הנפש שלי; רעיונות מגיחים ומקבלים צורה בפעולת הכתיבה.”

“כל אחד מאיתנו ניחן במוח עם כוחות ומגבלות ייחודיים משלו, לכל אחד יש הדרך הייחודית שלו ללכת בה. אל תשאף להיות מישהו אחר, אל תקנא באחרים. מה שיש לך הוא טוב מספיק.”

“במהלך כל חיי, כתבתי מיליוני מילים, אולם פעולת הכתיבה נדמת רעננה ומענגת כפי שהייתה בתחילה לפני כמעט שבעים שנה.”

“פעולת הכתיבה מספקת כשלעצמה; היא מבהירה את מחשבותיי ורגשותיי. פעולת הכתיבה היא חלק אינטגרלי מחיי הנפש שלי; רעיונות מגיחים ומקבלים צורה בפעולת הכתיבה.”

“Music evokes emotion and emotion can bring it's memory.”

“Our tests, our approaches...are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way.”

“Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past.”

“In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases they're not.”

“A union of literary and scientific cultures – there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come ... Davy himself was writing (and sometimes publishing) a good deal of poetry at the time; his notebooks mix details of chemical experiments, poems, and philosophical reflections all together; and these did not seem to exist in separate compartments in his mind.”

“Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to generate a spontaneous activity of its own, and this took the form of musical hallucinations, mostly musical memories from her earlier life. The brain needed to stay incessantly active, and if it was not getting its usual stimulation..., it would create its own stimulation in the form of hallucinations.”

“Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to throw objects..... (I see somewhat similar flinging behaviors- though not tics- in my two year old godson, now in a stage of primal antinomianism and anarchy)”

“Elements and birthdays have been intertwined for me since boyhood, when I learned about atomic numbers.”