Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
5 quotes
"Our tests, our approaches...are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way."
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
"If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique."
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
"Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent."
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
"Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, the total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, too easily."
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
"For 'wellness', naturally is no cause of complaint--people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill--not well. Unless, as George Eliot does, they have some intimation of 'wrongness' or danger, either through knowledge or association, or the very excess of excess. Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being 'very well', they may become suspicious if they feel 'too well'."
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales