Dementia Memory Quotes & Sayings

Let it be emphasized once more, and especially to anyone inclined to a personally rewarding skepticism in these matters: for practical purposes, the financial memory should be assumed to last, at a maximum, no more than 20 years. This is normally the time it takes for the recollection of one disaster to be erased and for some variant on previous dementia to come forward to capture the financial mind. It — John Kenneth Galbraith

Dementia isn't the only place that memories are found to be flawed - people find out they can't rely on their memories every day. People blindsided in relationships. People who find out their truth is a lie. People pulled from trauma. People awakened, as in Anna and Eve. I wondered: If you can't use memories to steer your life, what can you use? I didn't know. It was why I had to write this book. — Sally Hepworth

Her ability to use language, that thing that most separates humans from animals, was leaving her, and she was feeling less and less human as it departed. She's said a tearful good-bye to okay some time ago. — Lisa Genova

I am daily learning
To be the reluctant guardian of your memories
There was light in those eyes; I miss that — Richard L. Ratliff

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. — Andrea Lochen

[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 weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as having happened together. The actual year or season or time of day shifts to a different one. Many details are lost, usually in ways that serve the self in its present situation, not the self of ten or twenty or forty years ago when the remembered event took place. And even the fresh memory, the 'original,' is not reliable in a documentary sense ... Memory, in short, is not a record of the past but an evolving myth of understanding the psyche spins from its engagement with the world. — John Daniel

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) — Michael Zadoorian

Not all activities are equal in this regard. Those that involve genuine concentration - studying a musical instrument, playing board games, reading, and dancing - are associated with a lower risk for dementia. Dancing, which requires learning new moves, is both physically and mentally challenging and requires much concentration. Less intense activities, such as bowling, babysitting, and golfing, are not associated with a reduced incidence of Alzheimer's. (254) — Norman Doidge

I'm one of those who cut off seeing people after a certain time, when the weight is gone and they sound like the dementia is very advanced - I don't want to see that. I don't even go in to look at the body. That's not my last memory. — Bill Cosby

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

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 — S.K. Kalsi

And in time we may remember, collecting every little memory, all the bits and pieces, into a larger memory, rebuilding a great layered and labyrinthine, now imagined, international hotel of many rooms, the urban experiment of a homeless community built to house the needs of temporary lives. And for what? To resist death and dementia. To haunt a disappearing landscape. To forever embed this geography with our visions and voices. To kiss the past and you good-bye, leaving the indelible spit of our DNA on still moist lips. Sweet. Sour. Salty. Bitter. — Karen Tei Yamashita

Those whose lives have been an exercise in the pitting of their wits, or the selling of their talents, time and strength, to those who pay the piper, can even in their old age, even with their wits partially gone, automatically practise defences, and appeal for aid. But not so those who have never asked, who have never bargained. — Norah Hoult

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