{"author":"Oliver Sacks","author_id":"Oliver+Sacks","total_quotes":39,"quotes":[{"text":"...Read 1984 when it came out in 1949, and found its account of the ‘memory hole’ peculiarly evocative and frightening, for it accorded with my own doubts about my memory. I think that reading this led to an increase in my own journal keeping, and photographing, and an increased need to look at testimonies of the past.","author":"Oliver Sacks","tags":["memory"],"id":16163,"author_id":"Oliver+Sacks"},{"text":"I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life—achieving a sense of peace within oneself.","author":"Oliver Sacks","tags":["death","endd-of-life","morality","peace"],"id":19690,"author_id":"Oliver+Sacks"},{"text":"A union of literary and scientific cultures – there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come ... Davy himself was writing (and sometimes publishing) a good deal of poetry at the time; his notebooks mix details of chemical experiments, poems, and philosophical reflections all together; and these did not seem to exist in separate compartments in his mind.","author":"Oliver Sacks","tags":["chemistry","childhood","literature","science","science-and-arts"],"id":21808,"author_id":"Oliver+Sacks"},{"text":"I was on the shy side at school (one school report called me ‘diffident’) and Braefield had added a special timidity, but when I had a natural wonder... I lost all my diffidence, and freely approached others, all my fear forgotten.","author":"Oliver Sacks","tags":["childhood","curiosity","science","shyness"],"id":31694,"author_id":"Oliver+Sacks"},{"text":"There was an irony and a paradox here: Franco thought of Pontito constantly, saw it in fantasy, depicted it, as infinitely desirable – and yet he had a profound reluctance to return. But it is precisely such a paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia – for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled. And yet such fantasies are not just idle daydreams or fancies; they press toward some fulfillment, but an indirect one - the fulfillment of art. These, at least, are the terms that D. Geahchan, the French psychoanalyst, has used. With reference in particular to the greatest of nostalgies, Proust, the psychoanalyst David Werman speaks of an 'aesthetic crystallization of nostalgia' - nostalgia raised to the level of art and myth.","author":"Oliver Sacks","tags":["nostalgia"],"id":39567,"author_id":"Oliver+Sacks"},{"text":"Perception is never purely in the present - it has to draw on experience of the past.","author":"Oliver Sacks","tags":["science"],"id":45065,"author_id":"Oliver+Sacks"},{"text":"If the students were taught about shuttle flights, plate tectonics and submarine volcanoes, they were also immersed in the traditional myths of their culture—the ancient story, for example, of how the island of Pohnpei had been built under the direction of a mystical octopus, Lidakika. (I was fascinated by this, for it was the only cephalopod creation myth I had ever heard.","author":"Oliver Sacks","tags":["cephalopods","creation-myths","mythology","pohnpei"],"id":66209,"author_id":"Oliver+Sacks"},{"text":"Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.","author":"Oliver Sacks","tags":["kindlehighlight"],"id":103661,"author_id":"Oliver+Sacks"},{"text":"[photography]... Wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to manipulate them in my own way.","author":"Oliver Sacks","tags":["chemistry","childhood","photography","science"],"id":114981,"author_id":"Oliver+Sacks"},{"text":"My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special ‘cry’. ‘It’s due to deformation of the crystal structure,’ she said, forgetting that I was five, and could not understand her - and yet her words fascinated me, made me want to know more.","author":"Oliver Sacks","tags":["chemistry","childhood","science"],"id":134699,"author_id":"Oliver+Sacks"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":39,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}