The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales Quotes

“—¿Es usted desgraciado? —continué. —No puedo decir que lo sea. —¿Disfruta de la vida? —No puedo decir que disfrute… Vacilé, con miedo a estar yendo demasiado lejos, a estar desnudando a un hombre hasta dejar al descubierto alguna desesperación oculta, inadmisible, insoportable. —No disfruta usted de la vida —repetí, un poco titubeante— . ¿Cómo se siente usted, entonces, respecto a la vida? —No puedo decir que sienta nada. —¿Pero se siente usted vivo? —¿Que si me siento vivo? En realidad no. Hace muchísimo tiempo que no me siento vivo.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all . . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing . . .”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

“She has no words, and we lack words too. And society lacks words, and sympathy, for such states.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“At times the conviction of my want of being myself was overwhelming and most painful.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“She has succeeded in operating, but not in being.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“Кожен із нас має власну історію, внутрішню оповідь, створення і зміст якої фактично і є нашим життям. Можна сказати, що ми складаємось із тих історій, які створюємо і проживаємо.”
― Олівер Сакс, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“But it must be said from the outset that a disease is never a mere loss or excess - that there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, to compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“There is little or no hope of any recovery in his memory. But a man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibilities, moral being... It is here... you may touch him, and see a profound change”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“can’t tell you what I find wrong,’ I replied, ‘but I’ll say what I find right. You are a wonderful musician, and music is your life. What I would prescribe, in a case such as yours, is a life which consists entirely of music. Music has been the centre, now make it the whole, of your life.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

“Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us—through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives—we are each of us unique.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

“He reached out his hand, and took hold of his wife’s head, tried to lift it off, to put it on. He had apparently mistaken his wife for a hat! His wife looked as if she was used to such things.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

“and a strange nostalgia, as of a lost world, half forgotten, half recalled.*”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

“If Jimmie was briefly ‘held’ by a task or puzzle or game or calculation, held in the purely mental challenge of these, he would fall apart as soon as they were done, into the abyss of his nothingness, his amnesia. But if he was held in emotional and spiritual attention—in the contemplation of nature or art, in listening to music, in taking part in the Mass in chapel—the attention, its ‘mood’, its quietude, would persist for a while, and there would be in him a pensiveness and peace we rarely, if ever, saw during the rest of his life at the Home. I have known Jimmie now for nine years—and neuropsychologically, he has not changed in the least. He still has the severest, most devastating Korsakov’s, cannot remember isolated items for more than a few seconds, and has a dense amnesia going back to 1945. But humanly, spiritually, he is at times a different man altogether—no longer fluttering, restless, bored, and lost, but deeply attentive to the beauty and soul of the world. He liked gardening, and had taken over some of the work in our garden. At first he greeted the garden each day as new, but for some reason this had become more familiar to him than the inside of the Home. He almost never got lost or disoriented in the garden now; he patterned it, I think, on loved and remembered gardens from his youth in Connecticut.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“Pero hemos de decir desde el principio que una enfermedad no es nunca una mera pérdida o un mero exceso, que hay siempre una reacción por parte del organismo o individuo afectado para restaurar, reponer, compensar, y para preservar su identidad, por muy extraños que puedan ser los medios.”
― oliver sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“her attention cannot be drawn to them (‘hemi-inattention’—see Battersby 1956) and she has no conception that they are wrong. She knows it intellectually, and can understand, and laugh; but it is impossible for her to know it directly.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

“Si deve incominciare a perdere la memoria, anche solo brandelli di ricordi, per capire che in essa consiste la nostra vita. Senza memoria, la vita non è vita. La nostra memoria è la nostra coerenza, la nostra ragione, il nostro sentimento, persino il nostro agire. Senza di essa non siamo nulla.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“There is little or no hope of any recovery in his memory. But a man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibilities, moral being—matters of which neuropsychology cannot speak. And it is here, beyond the realm of an impersonal psychology, that you may find ways to touch him, and change him.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“You feel alive though?’
‘Feel alive? Not really. I haven’t felt alive for a very long time.’
His face wore a look of infinite sadness and resignation”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“It is winter. I feel dead. But i know the spring will come again.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“And society lacks words, and sympathy, for such states. The blind, at least, are treated with solicitude—we can imagine their state, and we treat them accordingly. But when Christina, painfully, clumsily, mounts a bus, she receives nothing but uncomprehending and angry snarls: 'What's wrong with you, lady? Are you blind—or blind-drunk?' What can she answer—'I have no proprioception'?”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“but empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being. Perhaps there is a philosophical as well as a clinical lesson here: that in Korsakov's, or dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage and Humean dissolution, there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“he solved all the puzzles, and could solve them easily; and he was far better and sharper than anyone else at games. And as he found this out, he grew fretful and restless again, and wandered the corridors, uneasy and bored and with a sense of indignity—games and puzzles were for children, a diversion. 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, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“Our tests, our approaches, I thought, as I watched her on the bench—enjoying not just a simple but a sacred view of nature—our approach, our 'evaluations', are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“If only he could be quiet, one feels, for an instant; if only he could stop the ceaseless chatter and jabber; if only he could relinquish the deceiving surface of illusions—then (ah then!) reality might seep in; something genuine, something deep, something true, something felt, could enter his soul.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“Experience is not possible until it is organised iconically; action is not possible unless it is organised iconically. 'The brain's record' of everything—everything alive—must be iconic. This is the final form of the brain's record, even though the preliminary form may be computational or programmatic. The final form of cerebral representation must be, or allow, 'art'—the artful scenery and melody of experience and action.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“even though José has no formal knowledge of botany, and could not be taught it or understand it if he tried. His mind is not built for the abstract, the conceptual. That is not available to him as a path to truth. But he has a passion and a real power for the particular—he loves it, he enters into it, he re-creates it. And the particular, if one is particular enough, is also a road—one might say nature's road—to reality and truth.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“Nature was beautiful, but mute. It was not enough. She needed the world re-presented to her in verbal images, in language, and seemed to have little difficulty following the metaphors and symbols of even quite deep poems, in striking contrast to her incapacity with simple propositions and instructions. The language of feeling, of the concrete, of image and symbol, formed a world she loved and, to a remarkable extent, could enter.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story—his real, inmost story?'—for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us—through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives—we are each of us unique.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“Complementary to any purely medicinal, or medical, approach there must also be an 'existential' approach: in particular, a sensitive understanding of action, art and play as being in essence healthy and free, and thus antagonistic to crude drives and impulsions, to 'the blind force of the subcortex' from which these patients suffer. The motionless Parkinsonian can sing and dance, and when he does so is completely free from his Parkinsonism; and when the galvanised Touretter sings, plays or acts, he in turn is completely liberated from his Tourette's. Here the 'I' vanquishes and reigns over the 'It'.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“We paid far too much attention to the defects of our patients, as Rebecca was the first to tell me, and far too little to what was intact and preserved.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales