What an odd thing it is to see an entire species -- billions of people -- playing with, listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call 'musi...
To what extent are we the authors, the creators of our own experiences? How much are these predetermined by the brains or senses we are born with, and to what extent do we shape our brains through exp...
To be ourselves we must have ourselves – possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must recollect ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narra...
She now receives love, attention, and invisible presents from a hallucinatory gentleman who visits faithfully each evening.
One must go to Dostoievsky who experienced on occasion ecstatic epileptic auras to which he attached momentous significance, to find an adequate historical parallel. There are moments, and it is only...
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 a...
My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on thi...
My pre-med studies in anatomy and physiology at Oxford had not prepared me in the least for real medicine.
My brother immediately confirmed the first bombing incident, saying, I remember it exactly as you described it. But regarding the second bombing, he said, You never saw it. You weren’t there. I was st...
In his autobiography, What Mad Pursuit, he speaks of the difference between physics and biology:
I sometimes wonder why I pushed myself so relentlessly in weight lifting. My motive, I think, was not an uncommon one; I was not the ninety-eight-pound weakling of bodybuilding advertisements, but I w...
I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going with our powers of language, consciousness of self, and autob...
Here then was the paradox of the President’s speech. We normals—aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled (‘Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur’). And so cunningly...
Henry VIII in full armor, it was said, weighed 500 pounds.
For there is often a struggle, and sometimes, even more interestingly, a collusion between the powers of pathology and creation.
Cualquier enfermedad introduce una duplicidad en la vida: un ello, con sus propias necesidades, exigencias y limitaciones.
But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not kno...
But the feeling of a limb as a sensory and motor part of oneself seems to be innate, built-in, hardwired—and this supposition is supported by the fact that people born without limbs may nonetheless ha...
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
Many cardinal characteristics of migraine aura, in its visual (scotomatous), tactile (paraesthetic) and aphasic forms. We