Everything in Its Place Quotes

“In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“Science sometimes sees itself as impersonal, as “pure thought', independent of its historical and human origins. It is often taught as if this were the case. But science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhoods.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“There is, among Orthodox Jews, a blessing to be said on witnessing the strange: one blesses God for the diversity of his creation, and one gives thanks for the wonder of the strange.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“Though I revere good writing and art and music, it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“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, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“My father called swimming “the elixir of life,” and certainly it seemed to be so for him: he swam daily, slowing down only slightly with time, until the grand age of ninety-four. I hope I can follow him, and swim till I die.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“Work could “normalize” and create community, could take patients out of their solipsistic inner worlds, and the effects of stopping it were demoralizing in the extreme.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“This Is Biology, a marvelous book on the rise and scope of biology that combines the spaciousness that a lifetime of thought brings with the eager immediacy of the boy who passionately tracked birds eighty years before. Such passion, as Mayr writes, is the key to vitality in old age:”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“the brain is to stay healthy, it must remain active, wondering, playing, exploring, and experimenting right to the end.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“I want a real book made of paper with print―a book with heft, with a bookish smell, as books have had for the last 550 years, a book that I can slip into my pocket or keep with its fellows on my bookshelves, where my eye might alight on it at unexpected times.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“I had no idea that this was happening―not only in the Einstein library but in college and public libraries all over the country. I was horrified when I visited the library recently and found the shelves, once overflowing, now sparsely occupied. Over the last years, most of the books, it seems, have been thrown out, with remarkably little objection from anyone. I felt that a murder, a crime had been committed: the destruction of centuries of knowledge. Seeing my distress, a librarian reassured me that everything 'of worth' had been digitized. But I do not use a computer, and I am deeply saddened by the loss of books, even bound periodicals, for there is something irreplaceable about a physical book: its look, its smell, its heft. I thought of how the library once cherished 'old' books, had a special room for old and rare books; and how in 1967, rummaging through the stacks, I had found an 1873 book, Edward Liveing's Megrim, which inspired me to write my own first book.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“But there is a fundamental difference between reading and being read to. When one reads actively, whether using the eyes or a finger, one is free to skip ahead or back, to reread, to ponder or daydream in the middle of a sentence―one reads in one's own time. Being read to, listening to an audiobook, is a more passive experience, subject to the vagaries of another's voice and largely unfolding in the narrator's own time.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“It drove home to us how essential it was to educate the public and transform their understanding—and how this could be done overnight, by a single television show.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“These are normal, if curious, behaviors, as Robert Provine emphasizes in his book Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“He followed this with another book, The Heavenly Report, somewhat different in style and approach, and then started on yet another, Message in the Bottle.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“No, my brain did not hurt. Perhaps it was more exasperating this way than if it had. I would have preferred it to hurt me. More terrifying than any actual pain was the fact that my position seemed impossible. It was impossible for a man to be lying here with his skull open and his brain exposed to the outer world—impossible for him to lie here and live…impossible, incredible, indecent, for him to remain alive—and not merely alive, but conscious and in his right mind.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“A Journey Round My Skull, the first autobiographical description of a journey inside the brain, remains one of the very best.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“the universe was a dynamic whole, held together by energies of opposite valence, and one in which energy, however transformed, was always conserved.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“My own greatest delight as a boy was to repeat Davy’s electrolytic production of sodium and potassium, to see these shining globules catch fire in the air, burning with a vivid yellow flame or a pale mauve one, and later, to obtain metallic rubidium”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“Duns Scotus, in the thirteenth century, spoke of “condelectari sibi,” the will finding delight in its own exercise; and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in our own time, speaks about “flow.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“Come scrittore, trovo che i giardini siano essenziali per il processo creativo: come medico, ogni volta che è possibile, porto i miei pazienti in un giardino. Tutti abbiamo avuto l'esperienza di vagabondare in un giardino rigoglioso o in un deserto senza tempo, di camminare lungo le sponde di un fiume o di un oceano, o di arrampicarci su una montagna, e di trovarci al tempo stesso rasserenati e rinvigoriti, mentalmente coinvolti, rigenerati nel corpo e nello spirito. L'importanza di questi stati fisiologici per la salute dell'individuo e della comunità è fondamentale e di vasta portata; in quarant'anni di esercizio della medicina, ho riscontrato che solo due tipi di «terapia» non farmacologica sono di vitale importanza per i pazienti con neuropatologie croniche: la musica e i giardini.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“One can never tell in advance what the practical use or scientific implications of anything new might be. Who would have thought that germanium—an obscure “semimetal” discovered in the 1880s—would turn out to be crucial to the development of transistors? Or that elements like neodymium and samarium, regarded for a century as mere curiosities, would be essential to the making of unprecedentedly powerful permanent magnets? Such questions are, in a sense, beside the point. We search for the island of stability because, like Mount Everest, it is there. But, as with Everest, there is profound emotion, too, infusing the scientific search to test a hypothesis. The quest for the magic island shows us that science is far from being coldness and calculation, as many people imagine, but is shot through with passion, longing, and romance.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“I would curl up in a chair and become so absorbed in what I was reading that all sense of time would be lost. Whenever I was late for lunch or dinner I could be found, completely enthralled by a book, in the library. I learned to read early, at three or four, and books, and our library, are among my first memories.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“One might think that five hundred lengths would be monotonous, boring, but I have never found swimming monotonous or boring. Swimming gives me a sort of joy, a sense of well-being so extreme that it becomes at times a sort of ecstasy. There is a total engagement in the act of swimming, in each stroke, and at the same time the mind can float free, become spellbound, in a state like a trance. I have never known anything so powerfully, so healthily euphoriant—and I am addicted to it, fretful when I cannot swim.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“Nelson feels that the “dark tunnel” described in most NDEs represents constriction of the visual fields due to compromised blood pressure in the eyes, and the “bright light” represents a flow of visual excitation from the brainstem, through visual relay stations, to the visual cortex (the so-called pons-geniculate-occipital pathway”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“To deny the possibility of any natural explanation for an NDE, as Dr. Alexander does, is more than unscientific—it is antiscientific. It precludes the scientific investigation of such states.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“But we know from the experience of Tony Cicoria and many others that a hallucinatory journey to the bright light and beyond, a full-blown NDE, can occur in twenty or thirty seconds, even though it seems to last much longer. Subjectively, during such a crisis, the very concept of time may seem variable or meaningless. The one most plausible hypothesis in Dr. Alexander’s case, then, is that his NDE occurred not during his coma, but as he was surfacing from the coma and his cortex was returning to full function. It is curious that he does not allow this obvious and natural explanation but instead insists on a supernatural one.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“But one almost always emerges gradually from a coma; there are intermediate stages of consciousness. It is in these transitional stages, where consciousness of a sort has returned, but not yet fully lucid consciousness, that NDEs tend to occur. Alexander”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“Neurologically, OBEs are a form of bodily illusion arising from a temporary dissociation of visual and proprioceptive representations—normally these are coordinated, so that one views the world, including one’s body, from the perspective of one’s own eyes, one’s head. OBEs, as Henrik Ehrsson and his fellow researchers in Stockholm have elegantly shown, can be produced experimentally, by using simple equipment—video goggles, mannequins, rubber arms, and so on—to confuse one’s visual input and one’s proprioceptive input and create an uncanny sense of disembodiedness.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales

“That which is not Body, is no part of the Universe: And because the Universe is All, that which is not part of it, is Nothing; and consequently no where.”
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales