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.

It really is a very odd business that all of us, to varying degrees, have music in our heads.

Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear.

If migraine patients have a common and legitimate second complaint besides their migraines, it is that they have not been listened to by physicians. Looked at, investigated, drugged, charged, but not listened to.

When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach.

I often feel that life is about to begin, only to realize it is almost over.

We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.