The peace of the Sabbath, of a stopped world, a time outside time, was palpable, infused everything, and I found myself drenched with a wistfulness, something akin to nostalgia, wondering what if: What if A and B and C had been different? What sort of person might I have been? What sort of a life might I have lived?
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Oliver Sacks
Neurologist and writer
United Kingdom · 1933–2015
Science and medicine
About
British neurologist who spent most of his career in New York, working with patients at Beth Abraham Hospital and later teaching at Columbia and NYU. His case histories, including Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, made clinical neurology a literary subject.
10 answers
And I spent four years at a boarding school in the country, probably a rather abusive boarding school, and seeing very little of my parents, and that was a very bad time for me. A bad and almost a mad time. ... I think that some sort of trust, and ability for closeness, may have been compromised. And I think I’ve perhaps, to some extent, sort of kept a distance since that time, although this is not a distance I feel with my patients or my students.
Recorded
Academy of Achievement recorded interview, American Academy of Achievement, 17 June 2000
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