Mira Bartok Quotes

We children of schizophrenics are the great secret keepers, the ones who don't want you to think that anything is wrong.

Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur.

Beautiful is what we see. More beautiful is what we understand. Most beautiful is what we do comprehend.

Cheryl Strayed reminds us, in her lyrical and courageous memoir Wild, of what it means to be fully alive, even in the face of catastrophe, physical and psychic hardship, and loss.

Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel says we are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember. Who am I, then, if my memory is impaired?

Eloquent and moving ... an extraordinary testament to the enduring power of love - beyond faith and dogma. It reminds us of why we are here: to love and live fully, to be curious about all things, and to live a compassionate - and passionate - authentic life.

At the bottom of the box were two big fairy-tale collections our father had sent us sometime after our parents divorced in 1963. I was four and my sister was five. We never saw him again. One book was a beautifully illustrated collection of Russian fairy tales inscribed, "To Rachel, from Daddy." The other, a book of Japanese fables, was inscribed to me. It had been years since I had opened them. I stared at the handwriting. Something seemed a bit off. Then it dawned on me - both inscriptions bore my own adolescent scrawl. I had always remembered the books and our father's dedications as proof of his love for us. Yet, how malleable our memories are, even if our brains are intact. Neuroscientists now suggest that while the core meaning of a long-term memory remains, the memory transforms each time we attempt to retrieve it. In fact, anatomical changes occur in the brain every single time we remember. As Proust said, "The only paradise is paradise lost.

He [Nicolaus Steno] told the audience, Beautiful is what we see. More beautiful is what we understand. Most beautiful is what we do not comprehend.

I felt held hostage by her illness and by the backward mental health system that once again was incapable of helping our family in crisis.

I don't want to be the person who gasps in fear whenever she hears the sound of a doorbell or a phone. I just want to lose myself in these hills, in the river winding west to the city of bridges.