301 Quotes by Oliver Sacks

I do not know how much a propensity to addiction is “hardwired” or how much it depends on circumstances or state of mind. All I know is that I was hooked after that night with an amphetamine-soaked joint and was to remain hooked for the next four years. In the thrall of amphetamines, sleep was impossible, food was neglected, and everything was subordinated to the stimulation of the pleasure centers in my brain.

Patients were real, often passionate individuals with real problems – and sometimes choices – of an often agonizing sort. It was not just a question of diagnosis and treatment; much graver questions could present themselves – questions about the quality of life and whether life was even worth living in some circumstances.

In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.

My pre-med studies in anatomy and physiology at Oxford had not prepared me in the least for real medicine.

My impression is that a sense of rhythm, which has no analog in language, is unique and that its correlation with movement is unique to human beings. Why else would children start to dance when they’re two or three? Chimpanzees don’t dance.

My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate – the genetic and neural fate – of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.

He has achieved what Nietzsche liked to call ‘The Great Health’ – rare humour, valour, and resilience of spirit: despite being, or because he is, afflicted with Tourette’s.

Temple is a hero now to many in the autism community around the world, widely admired for forcing all of us to see autism and Asperger’s not as neurological deficits so much as different modes of being, ones with their own unique dispositions and needs.