Anais Chartschenko > Anais's Quotes

“Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was expected to clock in at anywhere between 100 and 120 chapters. Unfortunately, the dude only managed to finish 24 tales before he suffered an insurmountable and permanent state of writer's block commonly known as death.”
― Jacopo della Quercia

“When we see the brain we realize that we are, at one level, no more than meat; and, on another, no more than fiction.”
― Paul Broks

“Cosmology and neuropsychology have absurdity in common. The raw facts are strange beyond imagination.”
― Paul Broks

“From a neuroscience perspective we are all divided and discontinuous. The mental processes underlying our sense of self-- feelings, thoughts, memories-- are scattered through different zones of the brain. There is no special point of convergence. No cockpit of the soul. No soul-pilot. They come together in a work of fiction. A human being is a story-telling machine. The self is a story.”
― Paul Broks, Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology

“Never practice magic when you're drunk.”
― Assaph Mehr, Murder In-Absentia

“Only one truth matters - how we feel about each other. Everything else is inconsequential.”
― Eva Leigh, From Duke Till Dawn

“You'd think hindsight would do us some good
But all it does sometimes
Is add glass to the kaleidoscope”
― J.D. Estrada, Black Tie Affair

“What does it do?” “I don’t know.” Robert shrugged. “It was on the original Roosevelt desk. We think it fired a pistol concealed beneath the tabletop.”
― Jacopo della Quercia, The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy

“The office's olive green walls with gold accents gave the room the charm of a poker table from the Old West”
― Jacopo della Quercia, The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy

“Abigail had no interest in the dolls themselves. Only in what she could keep from them.”
― Christie Stratos, Anatomy of a Darkened Heart

“Abigail had been shown all the things to be scared of when she was young, outright. Abigail had survived. She had not only survived - she had learned. And no one could scare her anymore.”
― Christie Stratos, Anatomy of a Darkened Heart

“Peace, love and maki rolls”
― J.D. Estrada

“It's not natural for women to fight."
"It's not natural for someone to be as stupid as he is tall, and yet there you stand.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“If you gotta go, go with a smile”
― J.D. Estrada

“I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, as they are, and not as you'd like them to be.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Nathaniel first stared at the vampiric Moses and then at the bizarre door. Numerous symbols had been carved deep in the surface and instead of square edges, they were rounded. Daniel then drew a dagger from his coat and proceeded to stand directly in front of the door. As he neared it, one could swear that the surface rippled like oil in a vat while he grazed it with the dagger. Quite suddenly, he jammed the blade in the very center of the door up to the very hilt. A high-pitched grunt followed and then a series of mechanical noises and clangs chimed and clicked until the door skid back two inches and descended into the ground.”
― J.D. Estrada, Only Human

“Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.”
― Winston Churchill

“When you have butterflies and you’re feeling anxious and you have anxiety or are nervous, that’s when you’re most powerful... A lot of people, instead of honing this power and using it, they allow it to just consume them. There’s another quote that says, ‘A big challenge, a big pressure is like a fire, it’s like a raging fire. Either you can allow this fire to consume you and just take you over completely, or you can gain control of this fire and harness it and you blow it right at your opponent, Dragonball Z style.’ That’s what I’m trying to do, trying to get my emotions under control and use this adrenaline to my advantage.”
― Jon Jones

“When I was twelve, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report, “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far,” and this was often the case.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“I have to remember, too, that sex is one of those areas—like religion and politics—where otherwise decent and rational people may have intense, irrational feelings.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place—irrespective of my subject—where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day. Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun, as when I started it nearly seventy years ago.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“We are all creatures of our upbringings, our cultures, our times.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“Individuality is deeply imbued in us from the very start, at the neuronal level. Even at a motor level, researchers have shown, an infant does not follow a set pattern of learning to walk or how to reach for something. Each baby experiments with different ways of reaching for objects and over the course of several months discovers or selects his own motor solutions. When we try to envisage the neural basis of such individual learning, we might imagine a "population" of movements (and their neural correlates) being strengthened or pruned away by experience.

Similar considerations arise with regard to recover and rehabilitation after strokes and other injuries. There are no rules; there is no prescribed path of recovery; every patient must discover or create his own motor and perceptual patterns, his own solutions to the challenges that face him; and it is the function of a sensitive therapist to help him in this.

And in its broadest sense, neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards.' —Kierkegaard”
― Oliver Sacks

“He died at home in his library, surrounded by the books he loved.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“I never took amphetamines again—despite sometimes-intense longings for them (the brain of an addict or an alcoholic is changed for life; the possibility, the temptation, of regression never go away).”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“I sometimes wonder why I pushed myself so relentlessly in weight lifting. My motive, I think, was not an uncommon one; I was not the ninety-eight-pound weakling of bodybuilding advertisements, but I was timid, diffident, insecure, submissive. I became strong—very strong—with all my weight lifting but found that this did nothing for my character, which remained exactly the same.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“And in its broadest sense, neural Darwinism implies that we are destined, whether we wish it or not, to a life of particularity and self-development, to make our own individual paths through life.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“Nothing I could say could repel or shock her; there seemed no limit to her powers of sympathy and understanding, the generosity and spaciousness of her heart.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“This drove home to me how barbaric our own medicine and our own customs are in the “civilized” world, where we put ill or demented people away and try to forget them.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life