Awakenings Quotes

“One must drop all presuppositions and dogmas and rules - for there only lead to stalemate or disaster; one must cease to regard all patients as replicas, and honor each one with individual reactions and propensities; and, in this way, with the patient as one's equal, one's co-explorer, not one's puppet, one may find therapeutic ways which are better than other ways, tactics which can be modified as occasion requires.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“We rationalize, we dissimilate, we pretend: we pretend that modern medicine is a rational science, all facts, no nonsense, and just what it seems. But we have only to tap its glossy veneer for it to split wide open, and reveal to us its roots and foundations, its old dark heart of metaphysics, mysticism, magic, and myth. Medicine is the oldest of the arts, and the oldest of the sciences: would one not expect it to spring from the deepest knowledge and feelings we have?”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“As Sicknes is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sicknes, is solitude...Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itselfe.
-DONNE”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“Diseases have a character of their own, but they also partake of our character; we have a character of our own, but we also partake of the world’s character: character is monadic or microcosmic, worlds within worlds within worlds, worlds which express worlds. The disease-the man-the world go together, and cannot be considered separately as things-in-themselves.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“from such abysses, from such severe sickness, one returns newborn, having shed one's skin … with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“Leonard L., speaking for them all, wrote at the end of his autobiography: ‘I am a living candle. I am consumed that you may learn. New things will be seen in the light of my suffering.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“being.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“Awakening, basically, is a reversal of this: the patient ceases to feel the presence of illness and the absence of the world, and comes to feel the absence of his illness and the full presence of the world.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“The structure of chaos is not static but dynamic;”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“there is a world of difference between complexity and anarchy. The weather is complex, it is not anarchic.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“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, Awakenings

“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, Awakenings

“Other worlds, other lives, even though so different from our own, have the power of arousing the sympathetic imagination, of awakening an intense and often creative resonance in others.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“I had not properly realised, until this time, the power of wish to distort and deny – and its prevalence in this complex situation, where the enthusiasm of doctors, and the distress of patients, might lie in unconscious collusion, equally concerned to wish away an unpalatable truth. The situation had similarities to what had occurred twenty years before, when cortisone was clothed with unlimited promise; and one could only hope that with the passage of time, and the accumulation of undeniable experience, a sense of reality would triumph over wish.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“The ‘other’ side, the good side, of chronic hospitals is that what staff they have may work and live in them for decades, may become extraordinarily close to their charges, the patients, get to know and love them, recognize, respect them, as people. So when I came to Mount Carmel I did not just encounter ‘eighty cases of post-encephalitic disease,’ but eighty individuals, whose inner lives and total being was (to a considerable extent) known to the staff, known in the vivid, concrete knowing of relationship, not the pallid, abstract knowing of medical knowledge. Coming to this community – a community of patients, but also of patients and staff – I found myself encountering the patients as individuals, whom I could less and less reduce to statistics or lists of symptoms”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“This sense of genuine and generous, if involuntary, martyrdom is not unknown to the patients themselves. Thus Leonard L., speaking for them all, wrote at the end of his autobiography: "I am a living candle. I am consumed that you may learn. New things will be seen in the light of my suffering".”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“Medicine is the oldest of the arts, and the oldest of the sciences: would one not expect it to spring from the deepest knowledge and feelings we have?”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“there is no necessary dilution of reality in representation; quite the opposite, if the representation has power. Reality is conferred, re-conferred, by every original representation.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“Ci ricordano che siamo sovrasviluppati in fatto di competenza meccanica, ma manchiamo di intelligenza, intuizione, consapevolezza biologiche; ed è questo, soprattutto, che dobbiamo riguadagnare, non solamente in medicina, ma nella scienza in generale.”
― Oliver Sacks, Risvegli