301 Quotes by Oliver Sacks

I am very bad at factual exams, yes-or-no questions, but can spread my wings with essays.

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.

The language of feeling, of the concrete, of image and symbol, formed a world she loved and, to a remarkable extent, could enter.

I only seem to find the right way after making every possible blunder, and finally exhausting all the wrong ways.

There are no files in my memory that are repressed,′ she asserted. ‘You have files that are blocked. I have none so painful that they’re blocked. There are no secrets, no locked doors – nothing is hidden. I can infer that there are hidden areas in other people, so that they can’t bear to talk of certain things. The amygdala locks the files of the hippocampus. In me, the amygdala doesn’t generate enough emotion to lock the files of the hippocampus.

What a paradox, what a cruelty, what an irony, there is here – that inner life and imagination may lie dull and dormant unless released, awakened, by an intoxication or disease! Precisely.

Having ferned for an hour, we take a break for our lunch and I eat, unwisely, quite an enormous meal...

One might say that science itself, and civilization and art, are all about different orderings of the world – to contain it, and to make it in some sense intelligible, communicable. And bearable.

What they are able to imagine becomes more real to them.