Epilepsy Quotes

“People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's divine. And so it is with everything in the universe”
― Hippocrates

“There's nothing more debilitating about a disability than the way people treat you over it.”
― Solange nicole

“It’s easier for me to make sense of it that way than it is for me to face the other way—reality. And yet, those evil spirits that were unleashed—be they fake entities from a stupid carnival ride, or cruel malevolencies from dark spiritual chasms of our universe—have stayed with me all these years”
― Tim Cummings, Orphans

“If an epileptic seizure is focused in a particular sweet spot in the temporal lobe, a person won´t have motor seizures, but instead something more subtle. The effect is something like a cognitive seizure, marked by changes of personality, hyperreligiosity (an obsession with religion and feelings of religious certainity), hypergraphia (extensive writing on a subject, usually about religion), the false sense of an external presence, and, often, the hearing voices that are attributed to a god. Some fraction of history´s prophets, martyrs, and leaders appear to have had temporal lobe epilepsy.

When the brain activity is kindled in the right spot, people hear voices. If a physician prescribes an anti-epileptic medication, the seizures go away and the voices disappear. Our reality depends on what our biology is up to.”
― David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

“I'm not an epileptic but you're an arsehole. I'm important. I matter. I can do anything. I'm a sexy, strong woman that happens to have epilepsy. Do you get it? I have epilepsy but it's not who I am.”
― Ray Robinson, Electricity

“I leave the kitchen table to bathe, and to dress for church. If only my closet held on its shelves an array of faces I could wear rather than dresses, I would know which face to put on today. As for the dresses, I haven't a clue.”
― Tim Cummings, Orphans

“Listen, we’ll come visit you. Okay? I’ll dress up as William Shakespeare, Lucent as Emily Dickinson, and beautiful ‘Ray’ as someone dashing and manly like Jules Verne or Ernest Hemingway...and we’ll write on your white-room walls. We’ll write you out of your supposed insanity. I love you, Micky Affias.

-James (from "Descendants of the Eminent")”
― Tim Cummings

“For if a man by magical arts and sacrifices will bring down the moon, and darken the sun, and induce storms, or fine weather, I should not believe that there was anything divine, but human, in these things, provided the power of the divine were overpowered by human knowledge and subjected to it.”
― Hippocrates, Hippocratic Writings

“We got there without being spotted. I pulled her in, then shut the door, pressing my back to it and exhaling like an epileptic pilot who'd just landed a cargo plane full of dynamite.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Firefight

“Anyone who’s anyone in Dostoevsky’s novels sooner or later develops brain fever.”
― W.F. Meredith

“What the hell is that?"

I jumped and glanced over to see Kristof staring at Grady, who was waving his arms, rolling his eyes, shaking and moaning.

"I think he's possessed," I said.

"By what? Epilepsy?”
― Kelley Armstrong, No Humans Involved

“Electricity is life but electricity is an invisible fist punching up your spine, knocking your brains right out of your skull.”
― Ray Robinson, Electricity

“[Epilepsy] gave her an adversity to fight against. It had shaped her personality, the need to be careful and secretive, and the ability to see things a bit differently from the neurotypical. She granted that this feeling of having a broken brain that required her to be sensitive, to look always inward to survive, might be why she turned artist.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Flies to Wanton Boys

“There’s a part of the human brain, the temporal lobe, that is associated with religious experiences as well as with epilepsy.”
― Ken MacLeod, Descent

“The human brain is the universe's most implausible science experiment.”
― Will Boast, Daphne

“Potassium Cyanide si hatari inapokuwa nje. Ni hatari inapojichanganya na asidi za tumboni ambapo hubadilika na kuwa gesi ya 'hydrogen cyanide'. Gesi ya 'hydrogen cyanide' ni miongoni mwa sumu hatari zaidi ulimwenguni. Mtu akimeza kidonge cha 'cyanide' atapata madhara makubwa. Kichwa chake kitamuuma hapohapo na atachanganyikiwa akili. Ngozi yake itakuwa nyekundu, kwa sababu damu yake itakuwa nyekundu zaidi – kutokana na kuzidi kwa oksijeni katika damu. Mwili hautakuwa na uwezo tena wa kuchukua oksijeni kutoka katika damu ili uitumie, kwa hiyo damu itazidi kuwa na oksijeni zaidi. Atapumua kwa shida. Mapafu yake yatafanya kazi vizuri lakini mwili wake hautakuwa na uwezo wa kutumia oksijeni yoyote – hivyo atadhani ana matatizo katika mfumo wake wa kupumua. Atazimia. Yaani, oksijeni haitafika kwenye ubongo. Atapata kifafa na atatapika nyongo. Ubongo wake utashindwa kufanya kazi na atakuwa mahututi ndani ya sekunde kumi! Baada ya hapo moyo wake utasimama kufanya kazi, na atafariki dunia.”
― Enock Maregesi

“Even though the world hails Joan of Arc as some sort of hero, which she undoubtedly was, what pains me the most is that her pathological condition ultimately led to her demise at the age of only nineteen.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Love, God & Neurons: Memoir of a scientist who found himself by getting lost

“...epilepsijos metu būdavo viena stadija prieš pat priepuolį (jeigu tik priepuolis ištikdavo dar su sąmone), kada staiga, užėjus liūdesiui, dvasinei tamsai, slogumui, protarpiais tarytum įsiliepsnodavo jo smegenyse ir nepaprastai įsitempdavo iš karto visos jo gyvybinės galios. Gyvybės, sąmoningumo pojūtis beveik dešimteriopai padidėdavo tomis akimirkomis, kurios praeidavo kaip žaibas. Protas, širdis nutviksdavo nepaprasta šviesa; visas jo susijaudinimas, visos dvejonės, visas nerimas tarytum nuščiūdavo iš karto, ištirpdavo kažin kokioje aukštesnėje rimtyje, sklidinoje giedro, harmoningo džiaugsmo ir vilties, sklidinoje išminties bei galutinės priežasties. Bet tokie momentai, tie pragiedruliai tik pranašaudavo tą galutinę sekundę (niekuomet ne ilgiau nei vieną sekundę), kurią prasidėdavo pats priepuolis.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I am Iris, Goddess of the Rainbow, the Sea and the Sky, and a Messenger to the Gods.’
‘W-what?’ Any minute now, I’ll wake up!
.‘I am here to deliver a message from the Great Moon Goddess Selene, who speaks to you through the song of the Siren, that which seduces the soul with its beauty.”
― Tracey Morait, Episode

“The light of Selene's chariot will appear before you and serve as your path”
― Tracey Morait, Episode

“I am Iris, Goddess of the Rainbow, the Sea and the Sky, and a Messenger to the Gods”
― Tracey Morait, Episode

“Never underestimate the potential of a person with a disability. You might be looking at a future author that will inspire the discouraged at heart.”
― Amy Crane, In My Right Mind: My Life with Epilepsy

“People always told me to have faith. Faith in what? Science? God? It was just something to say when no one knew what else to say.”
― Marjorie Jackson., Being is Better

“The air was filled with a big noise and I tried to move. I felt the heaven was going down upon the earth and that it had engulfed me. I have really touched God. He came into me myself, yes God exists, I cried, and I don’t remember anything else. You all, healthy people, he said, can’t imagine the happiness which we epileptics feel during the second or so before our fit.… I don’t know if this felicity lasts for seconds, hours or months, but believe me, for all the joys that life may bring, I would not exchange this one.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“In an electroencephalogram… one of her seizures was almost identical to an orgasm... Nothing happened during a seizure that couldn’t happen outside one, except that Roselyn was not in control of it and it happened all at once. Since then, she had experienced hundreds of orgasms and dozens of seizures and, though she didn’t come close to finding the latter nearly as entertaining as the former, it was always in her mind. In the midst of Dryden’s often machine gun lovemaking or her own considerably more directed and soft ministrations, it was always in the back of her mind at the moment of climax—this is a tenth of a seizure, this is a fifth of one.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Flies to Wanton Boys

“But they turned out to be prescriptions for medicines, and not for the common cold: opium, lavender oil, belladonna, orange rind, chloral hydrate, strychnine, potassium bromide. Such sedatives and stimulants were common remedies at that time for epilepsy.”
― Catherine Bailey, Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty

“What about the claim, by the PACE trial, that Graded Exercise Therapy and CBT can treat ME? This is a trial where you could enter moderately ill, get worse in the trial, and be declared ‘recovered’ at the end. Even the recent follow-up study conceded that, long-term, Graded Exercise and CBT are no better for ME than doing nothing. Investigative journalists and academics alike have dismissed the PACE trial as ‘clinical trial amateurism’.

Like MS or epilepsy, which were also once wrongly believed to be psychiatric disorders, ME is a neurological disease, and the World Health Organisation lists it as such. I am too weak to walk more than a few metres, needing to lie in bed 21 hours a day. With the little energy I have, I am an ME patient activist.”
― Tanya Marlow

“Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience A Study in Human Nature

“My condition, epilepsy, is a brain disorder, not a disease. There's a difference. You catch diseases. No one can "catch" epilepsy.”
― Marjorie Jackson., Being is Better

“I had grown used to watching her brain waves. It was a way of hearing her talk.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking