16 Quotes About Dementium

Dementia is a progressive disorder that affects memory, thinking, and behavior. According to the Alzheimer's Association , 1 in 8 seniors over the age of 65 will develop some sort of dementia. It's estimated that by 2050 more than 5 million Americans will have Alzheimer's disease. While there is no cure for this horrible disease, there are treatments that can help improve symptoms Read more

Check out our list of great dementia quotes to help you cope with the stress of having to care for someone who has this terrible illness.

Dementia was like a truth serum.
1
Dementia was like a truth serum. Amy Tan
2
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. Katy Butler
3
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 everyone to be their 't Barry Lyga
4
There is magic just outside our memory. Suzka
5
Violet unwrapped everything old as if it were a ribboned gift given to her by the Gods. Suzka
6
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 didn’t recognize their surface. She went much deeper. Suzka
7
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. Suzka
8
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 ‘see-through’ I became until, eventually, I would be just a wisp of a ghost. How much more convenient it would be, how much easier for everyone, including me, if my body just melted away along with my mind. Then we’d all know where we were, literally and metaphysically. . Rowan Coleman
9
[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
10
She’d forgotten to love, but she also forgot to hate. (about Clara’s mother, who had dementia) Louise Penny
11
Her memories got dizzy and fell out of her head. Suzka
12
…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. Jonathan Miles
13
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. Haruki Murakami
14
Shut your mouth - there's a bus coming. Linda De Quincey
15
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. Lisa Genova