Music originally had a social function. You were in church, in a concert hall, a marching band; you were dancing. I'm concerned that music could be too separated from its roots and just become a pleasure-giving experience, like a drug.

Very young children love and demand stories, and can understand complex matters presented as stories, when their powers of comprehending general concepts, paradigms, are almost nonexistent.

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.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me.

Dangerously well’— what an irony is this: it expresses precisely the doubleness, the paradox, of feeling ‘too well

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

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