“But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned -- the man who knew it, or the man who did not?”

“If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.”

“Astounded—and indifferent—for he was a man who, in effect, had no ‘day before’.”

“My note was a strange mixture of facts and observations, carefully noted and itemised, with irrepressible meditations on what such problems might 'mean', in regard to who and what and where this poor man was - whether, indeed, one could speak of an 'existence', given so absolute a privation of memory or continuity.”

“Dr. P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable -- of what happens to a science which eschews the judgmental, the particular, the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational.”

“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”

“And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: ‘A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being ... It is here ... you may touch him, and see a profound change.’ Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely.”