“‘One must die as a sighted person to be born again as a blind person,’ and the opposite is equally true: one must die as a blind person to be born again as a seeing person. It is the interim, the limbo—‘between two worlds, one dead / The other powerless to be born’ –that is so terrible" (141-142).

Alberto Valvo quoting one of his patients, in An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales by Oliver Sacks