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It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.

Oliver Sacks

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Oliver Sacks
Age: 82 †
Born: 1933
Born: July 9
Died: 2015
Died: August 30
Chemist
Neurologist
Physician Writer
Science Communicator
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Oliver Wolf Sacks
Choose
Live
Remain
Months

More quotes by Oliver Sacks

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I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can
Oliver Sacks
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Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.
Oliver Sacks
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Sign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.
Oliver Sacks
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Creativity...involves the power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of the imagination, to create and recreate worlds fully in one's mind-while supervising all this with a critical inner eye.
Oliver Sacks
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he wanted to do, to be, to feel- and could not he wanted sense, he wanted purpose- in Freud's words, 'Work and Love'.
Oliver Sacks
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I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.
Oliver Sacks
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I was always the youngest boy in my class at high school. I have retained this feeling of being the youngest, even though now I am almost the oldest person I know.
Oliver Sacks
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Creativity involves the depth of a mind, and many, many depths of unconsciousness.
Oliver Sacks
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Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.
Oliver Sacks
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Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.
Oliver Sacks
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A disease is never a mere loss or excess. There is always a reaction on the part of the organism or individual to restore, replace or compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be.
Oliver Sacks
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Eccentricity is like having an accent. It's what other people have.
Oliver Sacks
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If a man with a dog sits quietly enjoying music and smiling, his dog might sit down beside him and smile, too. But who knows whether the dog is having a comparable experience or whether the dog is simply happy that his master is happy.
Oliver Sacks
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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
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I think there's probably always been visions and voices, and these were variously ascribed to the divine or demonic or the muses. I think many poets still feel they depend on an inner voice, or a voice which tells them what to do.
Oliver Sacks
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It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.
Oliver Sacks
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With any hallucinations, if you can do functional brain imagery while theyre going on, you will find that the parts of the brain usually involved in seeing or hearing - in perception - have become super active by themselves. And this is an autonomous activity this does not happen with imagination.
Oliver Sacks
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I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved I have been given much and I have given something in return I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Oliver Sacks
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In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases theyre not.
Oliver Sacks
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There is no one part of the brain which recognizes or responds emotionally to music. Instead, there are many different parts responding to different aspects of music: to pitch, to frequency, to timbre, to tonal intervals, to consonance, to dissonance, to rhythm, to melodic contour, to harmony.
Oliver Sacks