Oliver Sacks Quotes

...read 1984 when it came out in 1949, and found its account of the ‘memory hole’ peculiarly evocati...

[photography]... wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to mani...

I was on the shy side at school (one school report called me ‘diffident’) and Braefield had added a ...

And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of ...

My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special ‘cry’. ‘It’s due to deformat...

In this, then, lies their power of understanding--understanding, without words, what is authentic or...

But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost...

Our tests, our approaches...are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not sho...

Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one ...

The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One...

For 'wellness', naturally is no cause of complaint--people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the...

In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the pers...

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, esc...

I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, i...

There was an irony and a paradox here: Franco thought of Pontito constantly, saw it in fantasy, depi...

Some people with Tourette's have flinging tics- sudden, seemingly motiveless urges or compulsions to...

As Sicknes is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sicknes, is solitude...Solitude is a to...

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.

There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a s...

What an odd thing it is to see an entire species -- billions of people -- playing with, listening to...

There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, ou...

The real functional "machinery" of the brain, for Edelman, consists of millions of neuronal groups, ...

We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is...

I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by livin...

If the students were taught about shuttle flights, plate tectonics and submarine volcanoes, they wer...

Given her deafness, the auditory part of the brain, deprived of its usual input, had started to gene...

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus...

The brain is more than an assemblage of autonomous modules, each crucial for a specific mental funct...

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

Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can a...

At 11, I could say ‘I am sodium’ (Element 11), and now at 79, I am gold.

Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no powe...

The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a ...

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

If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us ...

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories...

A union of literary and scientific cultures – there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was...

I liked numbers because they were solid, invariant; they stood unmoved in a chaotic world. There was...