The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat / Hallucinations / Awakenings Quotes

“To restore the human subject at the center—the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject—we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale; only then do we have a “who” as well as a “what,” a real person, a patient, in relation to disease—in relation to the physical. The patient’s essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient’s personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat / Hallucinations / Awakenings

“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. - Luis Bunuel”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat / Hallucinations / Awakenings

“All of us, at first, had high hopes of helping Jimmie-he was so personable, so likeable, so quick and intelligent, it was difficult to believe that he might be beyond help.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat / Hallucinations / Awakenings

“But who was more tragic, or who was more damned - the man who knew it, or the man who did not?”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat / Hallucinations / Awakenings

“She is an idiot Ecclesiastes," I said to myself. And in this phrase, my two visions of her—as idiot and as symbolist—met, collided and fused.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat / Hallucinations / Awakenings

“Hay que haber empezado a perder la memoria, aunque sea sólo a retazos, para darse cuenta de que esta memoria es lo que constituye toda nuestra vida. Una vida sin memoria no sería vida … Nuestra memoria es nuestra coherencia, nuestra razón, nuestra acción, nuestro sentimiento. Sin ella, no somos nada …. (Viene por fin la amnesia retrógrada, que puede borrar toda una vida, como le sucedió a mi madre – Luis Buñuel)”.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat / Hallucinations / Awakenings

“... that I feel myself a naturalist and a physician both; and that I am equally interested in diseases and people; perhaps, too, that I am equally drawn to the scientific and romantic, and continually see both in the human condition, not least in that quintessential human condition of sickness- animals get diseases, but only man falls radically into sickness.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat / Hallucinations / Awakenings

“...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: and to study or influence these means, no less than the primary insult to the nervous system, is an essential part of our role as physicians.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat / Hallucinations / Awakenings

“Si un hombre ha perdido una pierna o un ojo, sabe que ha perdido una pierna o un ojo; pero si ha perdido el yo, si se ha perdido a sí mismo, no puede saberlo, porque no está ahí ya para saberlo.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat / Hallucinations / Awakenings

“To restore the human subject at the centre--the suffering, afflicted, fighting, human subject--we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale; only then do we have a 'who' as well as a 'what', a real person, a patient, in relation to disease--in relation to the physical.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat / Hallucinations / Awakenings