17 quotes found
“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...”
“There is magic just outside our memory.”
“Violet unwrapped everything old as if it were a ribboned gift given to her by the Gods.”
“My mother had a way of accessing the energy of the people around her. There was no need to know their name, who they were or how she knew them. She didnt recognize their surface. She went much deeper.”
“This woman had no idea who I was. She has no idea I was once a smoker, was thrown out of boarding school twice and a certified rebel with strong opinions. To her, I was new, fresh, immaculate to th...”
“looking at my reflection, in the window opposite, hollow and translucent, I see a woman disappearing. It would help if I looked like that in real life if the more the disease advanced, the more se...”
“[Memory]... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weav...”
“Shed forgotten to love, but she also forgot to hate. (about Claras mother, who had dementia)”
“Her memories got dizzy and fell out of her head.”
“Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over.”
“wondering, not for the first time, if there was a kind of dark bliss built into dementia: an immunity from death and abandonment, a way of fixing a point in time so that nothing can change, nothing...”
“Shut your mouth - there's a bus coming.”
“And while a bald head and a looped ribbon were seen as badges of courage and hope, her reluctant vocabulary and vanishing memories advertised mental instability and impending insanity. Those with c...”
“She’d forgotten to love, but she also forgot to hate. (about Clara’s mother, who had dementia)”
“…wondering, not for the first time, if there was a kind of dark bliss built into dementia: an immunity from death and abandonment, a way of fixing a point in time so that nothing can change, nothin...”