On The Move: A Life Quotes
"I longed for movement and power, ease of movement and superhuman powers."
"Images of bikes and planes and horses merged for me, as did images of bikers and cowboys and pilots."
"I enjoyed sitting in the window seat of our front room, watching and trying to identify motorbikes as they sped by."
"Riding pillion thrilled me and stimulated daydreams of the sleek, powerful bike I would get one day."
"My first motorbike was a secondhand BSA Bantam with a little two-stroke engine and, as it turned out, faulty brakes."
"I hooted or yelled to warn pedestrians out of my way, but after I had made two or three circuits, everyone gave me a free path and shouted encouragement as I passed by again and again."
"I knew the bike would have to stop eventually, when it ran out of gas, and finally, after dozens of involuntary circuits of the park, the engine sputtered and died."
"Now I had to explain to my parents that a feeble little car or bike was dangerous because one lacked the power to pull out of trouble."
"My vision could be unmade, deconstructed, frighteningly but fascinatingly, in front of me, and then be remade, reconstructed, all in the space of a few minutes."
"I did not think why they hung around with me, but we all got scholarships to university."
"But in future, I want you to write your essays."
"I was in awe of Jonathan’s and Eric’s intelligence and couldn’t think why they hung around with me."
"I was not sure that he even knew of my existence at this point."
"We were taught to use our eyes and ears, to touch, to feel, even to smell."
"I felt sure I would do everything wrong, make a fool of myself, be seen as an incurable, even dangerous bungler."
"Reaction came a minute later: I rode another block, parked the bike in a side road—and fainted."
"Terrified, and deeply embarrassed—how could we invite friends, relatives, colleagues, anyone, to the house with Michael raving and rampaging upstairs?"
"I had never known a man so profoundly in touch with every aspect of his environment—physical, social, human."
"You don’t seem to have many girlfriends," he said. "Don’t you like girls?"
"When she did speak, there was no reference to what she had said (nor did she ever refer to the matter again), but something had come between us."
"We are all creatures of our upbringings, our cultures, our times."
"I thought he was a genius, or a genius in the making."
"But the library I most loved at Oxford was our own library at the Queen’s College."
"I was in a state of uncertainty about my own future at this time."
"I spent a few weeks traveling to other parts of Israel to get a feeling of the young, idealistic, beleaguered state."
"These systems had lost their middle ground, it seemed, so that any attempt to titrate them, damp them down, could tip the person from a pathologically heightened state to one of great dullness, a sort of mental death."
"It is a question of not just medication but the whole business of living a meaningful and enjoyable life."
"The shame of this—the feeling that I was a bad brother, not available to him when he was in such need—is still hot within me sixty years later."
"As he warmed up, the last traces of diffidence disappeared, and he emerged as the full-blown Sexual Athlete and Storyteller."
"Motorcyclists were a friendly lot; we waved to one another when we passed on the road, made conversation easily if we met at a café."
"I realized that I had bedded down on a huge mass of fungal spores, which I must have been inhaling all through the night."
"The effect was first disquieting and then uncanny."
"America, I imagined, was a classless society, a place where everyone, irrespective of birth, color, religion, education, or profession, could meet each other as fellow humans."
"He wore the peaked and crested cap all truckers wear, and a shirt emblazoned with the name of his company."
"I felt desperately lonely and rejected when Mel moved out."
"In fact, Mel and I kept in touch for another fifteen years."
"I had had dreams, in our 'honeymoon' period, that we would spend our lives together."
"While I took Richard Selig's delicate disengagement without feeling rebuffed."
"I devoted myself to my patients at UCLA, but those weekends I did not take off on my bike, I devoted to virtual travel—drug trips."
"I felt as helplessly driven as one of Olds’s rats."
"I knew a number of people on Muscle Beach who had died from massive doses of amphetamines."
"I had feared that I might be unemployed when my residency came to an end in June of 1965."
"My father would eat continually in the presence of food but go all day without food if it was not available."
"Unfortunately, her hip had broken in a bad place."
"It was, of course, more than a chance coincidence."
"A few years later, Topanga Canyon was to become a mecca for musicians, artists, and hippies."
"I had an apartment in Greenwich Village, and unless there was deep snow, I would ride my motorbike to work in the Bronx."
"I had no saddlebags, but the bike had a sturdy rack on the back to which I could secure what I needed with strong elastic bands."
"I was surprised, therefore, to get a postcard from him a couple of weeks later, suggesting that we meet in Paris."
"I was taken aback at his words, but I said, 'Let’s discuss it.'"
"My father, in what I felt was a rather cowardly way, said, 'You had better not anger this man—he could ruin your life.'"
"Jonathan, she wrote, 'remains the same unspoilt, simple, complex, brilliant, lovable, untidy genius—like you.'"
"I had feared for some of the patients, especially those who were immobile and needed frequent turning in bed to prevent bedsores."
"I still regarded England as my home and my twelve years in the States as little more than a prolonged visit."
"In a sort of way, then, we wrote the case histories of Awakenings together that summer."
"The damn thing is that it needs only three days good work to finish the book, but I don’t know whether I am capable of this at the moment."
"My heart is torn when I hear of your weakness, your misery—and, now, your longing to die."
"I never use one adjective if six seem to me better and, in their cumulative effect, more incisive."
"She tolerated, with mixed feelings, my meanderings and ponderings, but 'ringing true' was her ultimate value."
"I forced myself to work and dictate daily—a duty which rapidly became a delight as I got into the work more and more."
"What passes between physician and patient is confidential and even to write of it, in some sense, is a breach of this confidence."
"I am haunted by the density of reality and try to capture this with 'thick description.'"
"I realized, too late, that there were whole sides to her which I had known nothing about."
"I felt it would be improper to see them, because this would be profiting, in a sense, from a newspaper article."
"Ray sometimes thought of his Tourettic self as distinct from his 'real' self."
"His Tourettic self made Ray impulsive and disinhibited."
"This amazed me, for Tourette’s was described then as extremely rare."
"I thought there must be many other people like Ray."
"People with Tourette’s are often unusually open to hypnosis and suggestion."
"John P., a young man who said, 'I am the greatest Touretter in the world.'"
"Many tics and ticcish behaviors, I came to feel, were poised between the involuntary and the intentional."
"But this, alas, did not satisfy him. He started to make threatening phone calls to me."
"I had one supremely productive day and twenty-nine blocked or sterile ones."
"I had given occasional public lectures before, but after Hat came out, I was deluged with speaking invitations."
"But by and large, the medical silence continued."
"I fell in love with Manitoulin, a large island in Lake Huron."
"I knocked on the door, dripping, and met its owner—an ophthalmologist at Einstein."
"When I met her, in May of 1961, I was rather dirty and disheveled."
"I often went for long swims in the bay with another neighbor, David."
"He was a brilliant speaker and a darling of the lecture circuit."
"He was determined to avoid a meaningless busyness; he was frugal, and he could live and even save on his modest pension."
"Carmel was excited when Awakenings was taken up by Hollywood."
"She was a dangerous houseguest (I learned later), swiping art books from her hosts’ libraries and selling them to secondhand bookshops."
"She had no identity of her own, only those of the characters she played."
"I said, 'Good-bye, Carmel,' and a few minutes later she was dead."
"He had awoken one morning the previous summer with the first words of the play clear and pressing in his mind: 'Something is happening.'"
"I imagined Rose reading the play and saying, 'My God! He’s got me.'"
"Awakenings was the real thing, I felt; anything else would surely be 'unreal.'"
"Nobody’s really done that since Dr. Purdon Martin. He tried to understand what was really going on with you."
"The last scene of Michael’s life was played out in a hospital emergency room."
"Mr. I. had became colorblind after sixty-five years of seeing colors normally."
"The brain was regarded as a collection or mosaic of little organs, each with specific functions but somehow interconnected."
"The genetic code could not specify or control the fate of every single cell in the body."
"Biological populations consisted not of identical replicas but of different and distinct individuals."
"A baby turtle, on hatching, is ready to go. A human baby is not."
"Categorization is the central task of the brain."
"Reentrant signaling might be likened to a sort of neural United Nations."
"Natural selection could show me how cows in general had come to be."
"Higher-order consciousness brings an unprecedented power of generalization and reflection."
"I often encounter situations in day-to-day neurological practice which completely defeat classical neurological explanations."