Maria

“It is not good to want a thing too much. It sometimes drives the luck away. You must want it just enough, and you must be very tactful with Gods or the gods.”
― John Steinbeck, The Pearl

“One must drop all presuppositions and dogmas and rules - for there only lead to stalemate or disaster; one must cease to regard all patients as replicas, and honor each one with individual reactions and propensities; and, in this way, with the patient as one's equal, one's co-explorer, not one's puppet, one may find therapeutic ways which are better than other ways, tactics which can be modified as occasion requires.”
― Oliver Sacks, Awakenings

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realise that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all . . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing . . . (I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother’s . . .) —Luis Buñuel”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

“I’ll let you explain me to myself—that sounds intelligent and fantastic. Don’t worry about offending me—that’s quite impossible. .”
― Anaïs Nin, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anais Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953