301 Quotes by Oliver Sacks

I have discussed neurological aspects of time and motion perception, as well as cinematic vision, at greater length in two articles, “Speed” and “In the River of Consciousness.

That those who entered such nursing homes needed meaning – a life, an identity, dignity, self-respect, a degree of autonomy – was ignored or bypassed;.

Waking consciousness is dreaming – but dreaming constrained by external reality.

These then are tales of metamorphosis, brought about by neurological chance, but metamorphosis into alternative states of being, other forms of life, no less human for being so different.

Thinking of my schizophrenic brother, Michael, I asked Shengold if I too was schizophrenic. “No,” he answered. Was I then, I asked, “merely neurotic”? “No,” he answered. I left it there, we left it there, and there it has been left for the last forty-nine years. –.

Music can also evoke worlds very different from the personal, remembered worlds of events, people, places we have known.

I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life – achieving a sense of peace within oneself.

I suspect that music has qualities both of speech and writing – partly built in, partly individually constructed – and this goes on all through one’s life.

Leonard L., speaking for them all, wrote at the end of his autobiography: ‘I am a living candle. I am consumed that you may learn. New things will be seen in the light of my suffering.