Best 69 quotes in «dementia quotes» category

She almost thought she'd said the words aloud, but she hadn't. They remained trapped in her head, but not because they were barricaded by plaques and tangles. She just couldn't say them aloud

She could have rambled with all the fervor of a woman who had loved one entity for longer than most races live, and with the inviolable, unquestioned certainty found in dementia. There were references dated and sealed with meticulous care which she would have enthusiastically opened with the mirth of one proclaiming a lifetime of honors and awards. But that singular event was freshly disturbed; its pores still drifted on the faint zephyr of remembrance.

She’d forgotten to love, but she also forgot to hate. (about Clara’s mother, who had dementia)

She looked like some damn fool angel that didn't even know the name of God.

Shut your mouth - there's a bus coming.

So began a kind of magic in Dementialand that took place most nights after the day’s sun went down.

Someday, I suppose I’ll give up, and sit in the rocking chair. But I’ll probably be rocking fast, because I don’t know what I’ll do without a job.

So about an hour later we are in the taxi shooting along empty country roads towards town. The April light is clear as an alarm. As we pass them it gives a sudden sense of every object existing in space on its own shadow. I wish I could carry this clarity with me into the hospital where distinctions tend to flatten and coalesce. I wish I had been nicer to him before he got crazy. These are my two wishes.

The evening's light, silvery, casts its dull brightness onto the trees--trees gelid in this blue light of winter. But whiteness dominates with the pines and evergreens steeped in vibrant grades of silver. I hear notes in the mist, like silvery chattering, coins in a pocket, the jangle of keys. Pg 217

There is a duality to darkness known only to those who’ve been infected by its touch. Everyone knows the shadows: shallow, comfortable, mostly harmless places where one might nest for a night. But the depths of living pitch only visit the aristocracy of madmen and women who’ve unwittingly pledged fealty to the curse. For some, it outright ruins minds like a hound to fresh meat; for others, it wanes into the deepest parts of its less caustic sibling and waits for the time to strike, returning periodically through life like an incurable disease.

The lady roommate said very little and chopped off the better parts of her story.

The idea of disassociating from one’s surrounding, of taking a step back was rather clever on my mother’s part without her notice.

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 the bone. This was all strangely wonderful.

There is magic just outside our memory.

There were thousands of secrets hidden in her purse, secrets and memories that took her elsewhere. She held onto them tightly and kept them to herself. Even God did not know of them.

Violet believed that Jewish people made good doctors and lawyers, a thought that came to the front of her head suggesting she might need one.

Violet screamed into her pillow so loudly she scared herself. Her head hurt. It was as if all her memories were trying to kick their way out. They were finished and wanted to leave.

Violet wasn't sure what she was saying. Words fell out of her mouth with no mind and no malice.

Violet unwrapped everything old as if it were a ribboned gift given to her by the Gods.

Violet kept her visits private and never told me where she went. I really never asked. I believed the dementias gave her special powers.

…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 can be rewritten, no one can leave.

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 suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a nursing home. And so it was with my father. His mind did not melt evenly into undistinguishable lumps, like a dissolving sand castle. It was ravaged selectively, like Tintern Abbey, the Cistercian monastery in northern Wales suppressed in 1531 by King Henry VIII in his split with the Church of Rome. Tintern was turned over to a nobleman, its stained-glass windows smashed, its roof tiles taken up and relaid in village houses. Holy artifacts were sold to passing tourists. Religious statues turned up in nearby gardens. At least one interior wall was dismantled to build a pigsty. I've seen photographs of the remains that inspired Wordsworth: a Gothic skeleton, soaring and roofless, in a green hilly landscape. Grass grows in the transept. The vanished roof lets in light. The delicate stone tracery of its slim, arched quatrefoil windows opens onto green pastures where black-and-white cows graze. Its shape is beautiful, formal, and mysterious. After he developed dementia, my father was no longer useful to anybody. But in the shelter of his broken walls, my mother learned to balance her checkbook, and my heart melted and opened. Never would I wish upon my father the misery of his final years. But he was sacred in his ruin, and I took from it the shards that still sustain me.

When I got off the train back home, I saw the WHITE and COLORED signs that had been there all along, as it it was the first time.

While no one can change the outcome of dementia or Alzheimer's, with the right support you can change the journey.

Was the dementia of old age a blessing in disguise? No more thoughts. No more damage inflicted. No more memories of damage survived.

What made Olive the saddest about the Gardners was that everyone wanted to be enshrined in someone’s memory. It was the only way of living on after death, really: in the minds of loved ones. Memories were the only things that made aging bearable, a way of reverting to better, simpler days.

You will never experience personal growth, if you fear taking chances. And, you will never become successful, if you operate without integrity.

You only know yourself because of your memories.

There will be many cases when researchers will need to look at data to come closer to a cure, in maybe five years, 10 years, 15 years. We can help make that data analysis easier. We can't let this wait. Dementia has potential to cripple our economy.

I can't experience my brain because I'm inside of it. If you're imaging your brain, you can also find scary things. As one ages, your brain shrinks. And how much it shrinks, and where it shrinks, relates to conditions like Alzheimer's and dementia.

It is possible to live well with dementia and write best-sellers 'like wot I do.

Age isn't stealing from my grandmother; it's slowly unwinding her.

An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.

My experience of people in dementia is that a lot of their personality, a lot of their knowledge, a lot of their experience is still there but there's not a direction connection that they can just reach out and get it and then bring it back.

My mother was wonderfully out about her dementia. She would sort of - she would say to me, I came out to the window cleaner about having dementia. You know, I love the way that verb for coming out of the closet has now become so socially useful for all sorts of situations, like when you need to explain to the window cleaner that you don't know if you paid him or not.

Shakespeare wrote all there is that we need to know about dementia in 'King Lear.

A PET scan of his brain activity showed diminished capacity on the left side of his brain, hence, planning ahead, strategic thinking is harmed. A positive is that he is less critical of things. He has lost language and gained singing... THAT makes for more fun. What amazes me is that so many times he returns and talks and seems to think like he used to. His voice and laugh returns to normal. How can that be???

And sometimes when she does remember, she calls me her little angel and she knows where she is and everything is all right for a second or a minute and then we cry; she for the life that she lost I for the woman I only know about through the stories of her children.

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 cancer could expect to be supported by their community. Alice expected to be an outcast.

As a child, my aunt Olive had a friend Who was invisible to others. Topsy lived at the back of the garden. That this was just her imagination Olive always strenuously denied. And when she developed dementia many years later Topsy again faithfully kept her company. (From: Kinderpraat)

By loving you more, you love the person you are caring for more.

When you objectify a person living with dementia, you dehumanize them. Once dehumanized, the person becomes a villain.

Foto's zien is iets anders dan foto's kijken,' zeg ik. 'Iedereen kan foto's kijken maar een foto zien betekent dat je hem kunt lezen. Aan de ene kant heb je mensen en hun culturele voortbrengselen, aan de andere kant heb je de natuur. Bomen, meren, wolkenluchten spreken op foto's een algemene voor iedereen verstaanbare taal. Buiten de tijd om als het ware. Mensen, bouwwerken, wegen en koffiebussen daarentegen kunnen alleen gelezen worden in een bepaalde context, in de tijd, worden gelezen. U kunt dat fotoalbum op tafel voor het grootste deel niet lezen omdat u de noodzakelijke achtergrondinformatie mist. U was er niet bij. U kunt zich er met andere woorden niets bij voorstellen omdat u zich niet herinneren kunt wat eens echt te zien was. Het is uw verleden niet.

Caregiving will never be one-size-fits-all.

Dementia: Is it more painful to forget, or to be forgotten?

Dementia. Ruth puzzled over the diagnosis: How could such a beautiful-sounding word apply to such a destructive disease? It was a name befitting a goddess: Dementia, who caused her sister Demeter to forget to turn winter into spring.

Een geboorte of een huwelijk mag dan een belangrijke gebeurtenis zijn, maar het garandeert geen plaats in het geheugen.' De hersens, een zeef. 'Knoop dat in uw oren: niets is zeker. Zeker is niets.

I don't know which hurt more: his rejection, his punch, or my own elder siblings laughing at my pain.

Her memories got dizzy and fell out of her head.

Hi lover," he says to me, completely forgetting what happened before. He knows who I am. He knows that I am the one person who he loves, has always loved. No disease, no person can take that away. (p.205)