Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.
Oliver SacksDangerously wellโโ what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling โtoo well
Oliver SacksThe same areas which are active in listening to music are also active when you imagine music, and this includes the motor areas, too. That explains why earlier, even though I was only thinking of the mazurka, I was thinking in terms of movement.
Oliver SacksI regard music therapy as a tool of great power in many neurological disorders -- Parkinson's and Alzheimer's -- because of its unique capacity to organize or reorganize cerebral function when it has been damaged.
Oliver SacksI cannot pretend I am without fear. But 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; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Oliver SacksAnd so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: โA man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being ... It is here ... you may touch him, and see a profound change.โ Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely.
Oliver Sacks