# Quote — Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten

> On one occasion—it was an oppressive Saturday in the tense summer of 1939—I decided to ride my tricycle up and down Exeter Road near the house, but there was a sudden downpour and I got completely soaked. [Aunt] Annie wagged a finger at me, and shook her heavy head: “Riding on shabbas? You can't get away with it,” she said. “He sees everything, He is watching all the time!” I disliked Saturdays from this time on, disliked God, too (or at least the vindictive, punitive God that Annie's warning had evoked) and developed an uncomfortable, anxious, watched feeling about Saturdays (which persists, a little, to this day).

- Author: [Oliver Sacks](https://www.leafyquotes.com/oliver-sacks.md)
- Book: [Uncle Tungsten](https://www.leafyquotes.com/oliver-sacks/uncle-tungsten.md)
- Page: 172
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oliver_Sacks#Uncle_Tungsten_(2001)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/oliver-sacks/uncle-tungsten/on-one-occasion-it

## More from this book

> This new quantum mechanics promised to explain all of chemistry. And though I felt an exuberance at this, I felt a certain threat, too. “Chemistry,” wrote Crookes, “will be established upon an entirely new basis…. We shall be set free from the need for experiment, knowing a priori what the result of each and every experiment must be.” I was not sure I liked the sound of this. Did this mean that chemists of the future (if they existed) would never actually need to handle a chemical; might never see the colors of vanadium salts, never smell a hydrogen selenide, never admire the form of a crystal; might live in a colorless, scentless, mathematical world? This, for me, seemed and awful prospect, for I, at least, needed to smell and touch and feel, to place myself, my senses, in the middle of the perceptual world.

p. 312 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/oliver-sacks/uncle-tungsten/this-new-quantum.md)

> And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. […] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indecipherable language of tin (a confused memory, perhaps, of its plaintive “cry”). But my favorite dream is of going to the opera (I am Hafnium), sharing a box at the Met with the other heavy transition metals—my old and valued friends—Tantalum, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, and Tungsten.

p. 317 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/oliver-sacks/uncle-tungsten/and-i-often.md)

> When I was fourteen or fifteen […] the Yom Kippur service ended in an unforgettable way, for Schechter, who always put great effort into the blowing of the shofar—he would go red in the face with exertion—produced a long, seemingly endless note of unearthly beauty, and then dropped dead before us on the bema, the raised platform where he would sing. I had the feeling that God had killed Schechter, sent a thunderbolt, stricken him. The shock of this for everyone was tempered by the reflection that if there was ever a moment in which a soul was pure, forgiven, relieved of all sin, it was at this moment, when the shofar was blown in conclusion of the fast […].

p. 177 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/oliver-sacks/uncle-tungsten/when-i-was.md)