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.

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.

I had never thought about what it might mean to be deaf, to be deprived of language, or to have a remarkable language (and community and culture) of one’s own. Up to this point, I had mostly thought and written about the problems of individuals–here I was to encounter an entire community.

he wanted to do, to be, to feel- and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose- in Freud's words, 'Work and Love'.

Dr. Kertesz mentioned to me a case known to him of a farmer who had developed prosopagnosia and in consequence could no longer distinguish (the faces of) his cows, and of another such patient, an attendant in a Natural History Museum, who mistook his own reflection for the diorama of an ape

There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate - the genetic and neural fate - of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

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