To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future; the freedom to get beyond ourselves...in states of mind that allow us to rise above our immediate surroundings and see the beauty and value of the world we live in.

I suspect that music has qualities both of speech and writing - partly built in, partly individually constructed - and this goes on all through one's life.

The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace--

there are other senses -­ secret senses, sixth senses, if you will -­ equally vital, but unrecognized, and unlauded.

People will make a life in their own terms, whether they are deaf or colorblind or autistic or whatever. And their world will be quite as rich and interesting and full as our world.

Fascinating, Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain.

The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication.