Quotes by Oliver Sacks

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

“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our liv...”

“In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.”

“The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace--”

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

“There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, ...”

“Waking consciousness is dreaming but dreaming constrained by external reality”

“A union of literary and scientific culturesthere 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...”

“Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.”

“If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, u...”

“...read 1984 when it came out in 1949, and found its account of the memory hole peculiarly evocative and frightening, for it accorded with my own doubts about my memory. I think that reading this l...”

“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 ...”

“But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not ...”

“There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach yo...”

“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 o...”

“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, ...”

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

“And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. [] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indeci...”

“I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends.”

“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...”