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.

— Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks Quotes

This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world.

— Oliver Sacks

I had found myself thinking of time – time and perception, time and consciousness, time and memory, time and music, time and movement. I had returned, in particular, to the question of whether the apparently continuous passage of time and movement given to us by our eyes was an illusion – whether in fact our visual experience consisted of a series of timeless “moments” which were then welded together by some higher mechanism in the brain.

— Oliver Sacks

Times of stress throughout my life have led me to turn, or return, to the physical sciences, a world where there is no life, but also no death.

— Oliver Sacks

The hateful mood of a migraine – depressed and withdrawn, or furious and irascible – tends to melt away in the stage of lysis, to melt away with the physiological secretion. “Resolution by secretion” thus resembles a catharsis on both physiological and psychological levels, like weeping for grief. The.

— Oliver Sacks

Sudden fright, or rage, or other strong emotion may disperse and displace a migraine almost within seconds. One.

— Oliver Sacks

I am haunted by the density of reality.

— Oliver Sacks

With neurology, if you go far enough with it, and you keep going, you end up getting weird. If you go a little further, you end up in the spirit.

— Oliver Sacks

I realize that if love were the cure, I would have been healed a long time ago.

— Oliver Sacks

The act of writing is itself enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing.

— Oliver Sacks

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can.

— Oliver Sacks

The terrors of suffering, sickness and death, of losing ourselves and losing the world, are the most elemental and intense we know; and so too are our dreams of recovery and rebirth, of being wonderfully restored to ourselves and the world.

— Oliver Sacks

Clearly, passionately, he wanted something to do: 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

McKenzie once called Parkinsonism “an organized chaos,” and this is equally true of migraine. First there is chaos, then organization, a sick order; it is difficult to know which is worse! The nastiness of the first lies in its uncertainty, its flux; the nastiness of the second in its sense of immutable heavy permanence. Typically, indeed, treatment is only possible early, before migraine has “solidified” into immovable fixed forms.

— Oliver Sacks

I had been given not a remission, but an intermission, a time to deepen friendships, to see patients, to write, and to travel back to my homeland, England.

— Oliver Sacks

In the long hours that followed, I was assailed by memories, both good and bad. Most were in a mode of gratitude – gratitude for what I had been given by others, gratitude too that I had been able to give something back.

— Oliver Sacks

The perverse need for illness – both in patients themselves, and sometimes in those who are close to them – must be a major determinant in causing relapses, the most insidious enemy of the will-to-get-better:.

— Oliver Sacks

He said that he had learned Transcendental Meditation as a way of dealing with otherwise uncontrollable ticcing in public places.“It’s just autohypnosis,” he explained. “You have a mantra, a little word or phrase repeating slowly in your mind, and you soon get into a sort of trance and become oblivious to everything. It calms me down.” He remained almost tic-free for the rest of the evening.

— Oliver Sacks

We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative – whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a ‘narrative’, and that this narrative is us, our identities.

— Oliver Sacks

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends. I shall no longer look at the NewsHour every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

— Oliver Sacks

There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever.

— Oliver Sacks
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