We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.Oliver Sacks
This loss of the sense of self, however it happens, is indeed a catastrophe, but it is not necessarily a tragedy.Oliver Sacks
It is no less than a sense of one’s life, moment by moment, a realization which may split second by second, splintering consciousness, splintering identity.Oliver Sacks
The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth, open to everything, sending out messages to everything.Oliver Sacks
Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings.Oliver Sacks
It is not only memory that is essential to intelligence; it is forgetting too.Oliver Sacks
One must drop all presuppositions and dogmas and rules - for these only lead to stalemate or disaster; one must cease to regard all patients as alike, and to react to them as if they were predictable machines.Oliver Sacks
For the sense of continuity and identity depends on a continuous inferential activity, the creation, moment by moment, of a sort of personal myth.Oliver Sacks
What a narrow ridge of normality we all inhabit, with the abysses of mania and depression yawning to either side.Oliver Sacks
Neurology's favourite word is 'deficit', denoting an impairment or incapacity of neurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity, loss of identity and myriad other lacks and losses of specific functions or abilities….Oliver Sacks