301 Quotes by Oliver Sacks

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

I feel glad to be alive – “I’m glad I’m not dead!” sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect.

When writing my Leg book, I drew heavily on the detailed journals I had kept as a patient in 1974. Oaxaca Journal, too, relied heavily on my handwritten notebooks. But for the most part, I rarely look at the journals I have kept for the greater part of a lifetime. The act of writing is itself enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing.

It may, in its natural course, exhaust itself and end in sleep; the post-migrainous sleep is long, deep, and refreshing, like a post-epileptic sleep. Secondly, it may resolve by “lysis,” a gradual abatement of the suffering accompanied by one or more secretory activities. As.

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

For me, this was an example of how unconscious motives may sometimes ally themselves to physiological propensities, of how one cannot abstract an ailment or its treatment from the whole pattern, the context, the economy of someone’s life.

God thinks in numbers,’ Auntie Len used to say. ‘Numbers are the way the world is put together.

The old man suddenly became intent, his brows knitted, his lips pursed. He stood motionless, in deep thought, presenting the picture that I love to see: a patient in the actual moment of discovery – half-appalled, half-amused – seeing for the first time exactly what is wrong and, in the same moment, exactly what there is to be done. This is the therapeutic moment.

Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards.” – Kierkegaard.