“If you can't give it all you've got, don't bother.”

“Sometimes the gap between what you are and what you want to be is a little piece of paper called your college degree. So jump.”

“Not everything you're good at is what you're called to do.”

“There's something very enticing about an empty bench under a tree. And if it's facing a river, that's the bench for me.”

“I know I can't own a hilltop, a meadow, or a mountainside. But keeping it a secret somehow makes it mine.”

“When I trust someone I do it without doubt or fear or reservation. And then I work on a Plan B.”

“A nation discovers its truest dignity when it cherishes the dignity of those from whom it has not heard for a very long time.”

“I pray for my mother. That if she can't ever recover what she's lost or what she's losing, that she not feel like she's lost. I pray that we make her feel necessary and valued as long as possible. ...”

“If you knew you were going to lose your memorybut you could choose five things youd never forget, what would they bea certain face, a taste, a scent,a touch; how deepin this, the middle of your life?”

“Dementia was like a truth serum.”

“When a fine old carpet is eaten by mice, the colors and patterns of what's left behind do not change,' wrote my neighbor and friend, the poet Jane Hirschfield, after she visited an old friend suffe...”

“Psychologist: "This, ah, is a new sort of, ah, psychopathology that we're only now beginning to, ah, understand. These, ah, super-serial killers have no, ah, 'type' but, ah, rather consider everyon...”

“Blessed is the society with elderly souls.”

“From warm meals, to daily exercise, to healthcare; one can't help but wonder how our society would be different if tended to the elderly as we do to our imprisoned.”

“We are never old with the strength of the spirit, although the body may fail.”