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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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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
Always
Class
High
Though
Retained
Feelings
Youngest
School
Oldest
Persons
Boys
Person
Almost
Even
Feeling

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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.
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I am now face to face with dying. But I am not finished with living.
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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.
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I cannot pretend i am not without fear.
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Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.
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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.
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I rejoice when I meet gifted young people... I feel the future is in good hands.
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Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.
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Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well
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It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.
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There is only one cardinal rule: One must always listen to the patient.
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If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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Even when other powers have been lost and people may not even be able to understand language, they will nearly always recognize and respond to familiar tunes. And not only that. The tunes may carry them back and may give them memory of scenes and emotions otherwise unavailable for them.
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If migraine patients have a common and legitimate second complaint besides their migraines, it is that they have not been listened to by physicians. Looked at, investigated, drugged, charged, but not listened to.
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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.
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I was fascinated that one could have such perceptual changes, and also that they went with a certain feeling of significance, an almost numinous feeling. I'm strongly atheist by disposition, but nonetheless when this happened, I couldn't help thinking, 'That must be what the hand of God is like.'
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Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.
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