Sam Shepard Quotes

Words don't go from the brain to the lips in time. That's what a stroke does to you... and that hurts me.

I never did think I had brain damage.

For somebody who has injured their brain, every single thing they say and think will be the subject of their own questioning.

My daughter couldn't wake me up, so they called 911. They rushed me to the hospital. They drilled a hole in my head and wrapped a coil around my brain. I was unconscious for a week, and I was in rehab for two months - couldn't walk, couldn't talk. Now I've relearned everything. I'm so happy.

Fifteen years ago, I suffered a stroke, which caused me to lose my speech. Now, what does an actor who can't talk do? Wait for silent pictures to come back? I work with a speech therapist twice a week.

I miss singing every day. I can't sing anymore. My voice doesn't work. I have Parkinson's disease, and it sometimes takes my words away from me.

I feel vulnerable because my mind - because of the stroke, my mind doesn't focus. And then I feel vulnerable because I don't understand the world around me.

I have times when I'm off-balance. I have times when I slur my words. I have times when I walk into walls. I have times when I can't remember somebody's name.

Before my mother's diagnosis with Alzheimer's, I had heard of the disease, but hadn't known anyone who had suffered from it.

I had - there were three strokes, and I lost my ability to read and write and speak, and it really put me by the wayside for a number of years.

I lost the power to write and I had to sort of relearn how to read and write to a certain extent and speak fluently.

You know, I'd forget words and start just singing noises.

I have learned the hard way that concussions are not fun.

I started having some memory-loss issues. I took a neurological exam, and they said, "Well, you should stop fighting now." And I kept begging them for one more fight, one more fight, and the doctor said to me, "How much are they going to pay you?" I was supposed to fight three more times, and one would have been for a cruiser belt. So I said, "I just need to fight three more times." He said, "Listen, you can't even get hit in the head one more time, your neuro is so bad."

People do not realize that Alzheimer's is not old age. It is a progressive and fatal disease and staggering amounts of people develop Alzheimer's every day.

Gosh, I couldn't even talk right until I was about 6 years old or something like that.

I had a lot of trouble speaking as a kid. I didn't really speak in coherent sentences until I was, like, 6 years old. There was a long time where everybody was very worried, because my sisters were so advanced for their age, and I would barely talk.

Very few people run around and get amnesia and have comas and come out of them and do all the silly of people have strokes and have comas and come out of them and do all the silly things we do on soaps.

Dementia is, after all, a symptom of organic brain damage. It is a condition, a disorder of the central nervous system, brought about in my case by a viral assault on brain tissue. When the assault wiped out certain intellectual processes, it also affected emotional processes.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

Without a functioning hippocampus, names, dates, and other information falls straight through the mind like a sieve.

The president was madman Reagan who's got Alzheimer's and has lost his mind. He now crawls on all fours.

I don't know a great deal about Alzheimer's - just what it does.

I got tested to see what condition my brain is in. And it's not in real good shape.

In my case, symptoms began to appear when I was only 57. In fact, the doctors believe early-onset Alzheimer's has a strong genetic predictor, and that it may have been progressing for some years before I was diagnosed.