Gerhard

“The great and terrible thing about humankind is simply this: we will always do what we are capable of.”
― Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

“Carefully, stealthily, Caleb added this photograph to the portraits of Russell and Julia. Then, calm as anything, he slipped them into his backpack, tucking them in the front cover of John Halifax, Gentleman, so they wouldn’t get crumpled. Russell needed them more than the archive, anyway.”
― Aster Glenn Gray, The Sleeping Soldier

“The concept of “brain plasticity” refers to the ongoing capacity of the brain and the nervous system to change itself. Everything that we do, think, feel, and experience changes our brain. A stroke or a traumatic brain injury can affect brain plasticity, and plasticity may also be associated with such developmental disorders as autism. Increased brain plasticity may also potentially endow a person with unanticipated new abilities, as John appears to have experienced in this book. TMS, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, the intervention that John undergoes, provides a unique opportunity for us to learn about the mechanisms of plasticity, and to identify alterations in the brain’s networks that may be responsible for a patient’s problematic symptoms, and also for recovery.”
― John Elder Robison, Switched On: A Memoir of Brain Change and Emotional Awakening

“After all, one of the great things about books is that they don’t disappear after the first year of their publication—barring floods and thieves, they can loiter forever on your shelves, waiting to be picked up and rediscovered, manic publicity cycle be damned. They can be revisited, loaned out, traded, forgotten and found. They can have strange, long lives.”
― Emily Temple