People will make a life in their own terms, whether they are deaf or colorblind or autistic or whatever. And their world will be quite as rich and interesting and full as our world.
Interpretation
Everyone creates their own unique life experience, regardless of disabilities or differences.
This quote by Oliver Sacks emphasizes the richness of individual lives and experiences, pointing out that people with disabilities, such as being deaf, colorblind, or autistic, can lead fulfilling and interesting lives on their own terms. It challenges the notion that one's value or the quality of life depends on conforming to societal norms or perceptions of 'normalcy'.
In practice
In a motivational talk about embracing diversity, this quote can highlight the value of unique experiences.
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.
In general, people are afraid to acknowledge hallucinations because they immediately see them as a sign of something awful happening to the brain, whereas in most cases they're not.
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
Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.
We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
I rejoice when I meet gifted young people... I feel the future is in good hands.
To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.
A career is a wonderful thing, but you can't snuggle up to it at night.
I come home that morning, after I been fired, and stood outside my house with my new work shoes on. The shoes my mama paid a month's worth a light bill for. I guess that's when I understood what shame was and the color of it too. Shame ain't black, like dirt, like I always thought it was. Shame be the color of a new white uniform your mother ironed all night to pay for, white without a smudge or a speck a work-dirt on it.
His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He had forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him.
Everybody just wants to appreciate time as it's passing, to be in the moment. It's the hardest thing to do. You're either in the unknown future that you're working toward, or you're in the past that becomes a little abstract.
Sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life instead of the good life. And I think, for many people, that wake-up call takes the form of an illness.
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