Ismet Berkan

“A man might think he can stare into the abyss without falling in but sometimes the abyss stares back. Sometimes the abyss exerts a strange effect on your sense of balance.”
― Philip Kerr, The Lady from Zagreb

“As I demonstrated this on Bob, he fell backwards onto me, completely inert and passive, with no hint of any reflexive reaction. Startled, I pushed him gently forward to the upright position, but now he started to topple forward; I could not balance him. I had a sense of bewilderment mixed with panic. For a moment, I thought that there had suddenly been a neurological catastrophe, that he had actually lost all his postural reflexes. Could acting like this, I wondered, actually alter the nervous system? The next day I was talking with him in his dressing room before the day’s shooting began, and as we talked, I noticed that his right foot was turned in with precisely the dystonic curvature it was held in when he portrayed Leonard L. on the set. I commented on this, and Bob seemed rather startled. “I didn’t realize,” he said. “I guess it’s unconscious.” He sometimes stayed in character for hours or days; he would make comments at dinner which belonged to Leonard, not himself, as if residues of the Leonard mind and character were still adhering to him.”
― Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life

“Of the many strange things Einstein’s work revealed, the fluidity of time is the hardest to grasp. Whereas everyday experience convinces us that there is an objective concept of time’s passage, relativity shows this to be an artifact of life at slow speeds and weak gravity. Move near light speed, or immerse yourself in a powerful gravitational field, and the familiar, universal conception of time will evaporate. If you’re rushing past me, things I insist happened at the same moment will appear to you to have occurred at different moments. If you’re hanging out near the edge of a black hole, an hour’s passage on your watch will be monumentally longer on mine.”
― Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

“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