301 Quotes by Oliver Sacks

Culture is as crucial as Nature.

Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears – it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.

I have drunk more than seventy cups of coffee in the past thirty hours, and this achievement deserves some small concession. Eight.

The lack of social support and sympathy is an additional trial: disabled, but with the nature of her disability not clear – she is not, after all, manifestly blind or paralysed, manifestly anything – she tends to be treated as a phoney or a fool.

The players are connected. Each player, interpreting the music individually, constantly modulates and is modulated by the others. There is no final or “master” interpretation; the music is collectively created, and every performance is unique. This is Edelman’s picture of the brain, as an orchestra, an ensemble, but without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music.

I regard music therapy as a tool of great power in many neurological disorders – Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s – because of its unique capacity to organize or reorganize cerebral function when it has been damaged.

All the trouble starts when people forget they’re human.

Perhaps there is a philosophical as well as a clinical lesson here: that in Korsakov’s, or dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage and Humean dissolution, there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation.

Even worse, this sort of pain had an affective component all its own, which I found difficult to describe, a quality of agony, of anguish, of horror – words which still do not catch its essence. Neuralgic pain cannot be “embraced,” fought against, or accommodated. It crushes one into a quivering, almost mindless sort of pulp; all one’s powers of will, one’s very identity, disappear under the assault of such pain. I.