Nick Cave Quotes

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all... Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it we are nothing.

Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.

I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul.

I do know people and there are people in my family who have had Alzheimer's and dementia, and I appreciate the importance of communication and having contact with them. Communicating is an interesting thing with a condition like that. Sometimes it's difficult to communicate. If the brain becomes atrophied or certain channels of the brain become atrophied, then contact is what becomes really important.

As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer's because it attacks the two things most central to a writer's craft - language and memory, which together make up an individual's identity. Alzheimer's makes a new character out of a familiar person.

Can I remember exactly when I 'lost' my husband? Was it the moment when I had to start tying his shoelaces for him? Or when we stopped being able to laugh with each other? Looking back, that turning point is impossible to pinpoint. But then, that's the nature of dementia.

When you deal with a person who's experiencing dementia, you can see where they're struggling with knowledge. You can see what they forget completely, what they forget but they know what they once knew. You can tell how they're trying to remember.

None of us wants to be reminded that dementia is random, relentless, and frighteningly common.

At 93, so deep in dementia that she didn't remember any details of her life, my mother somehow still knew songs.

My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.

I think the earlier stages of Alzheimer's are the hardest. Particularly because the person knows that they are losing awareness. They're aware that they're losing awareness, and you see them struggling.

With something like cancer, there is a feeling that you can fight it in some way or control your response to it, but with dementia there is the fear of losing control of your mind and your life.

I originally got very interested in memory in high school when my grandmother came to live with us. She had been diagnosed with dementia. It was the first time I had heard the word 'Alzheimer's disease.'

My grandfather said, "When you become senile, you won't know it."

That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.

...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.

Hunger steals the memory

You know, as you get older, the first thing you lose is memory. It seems to be happening with me.

My husband is stricken with dementia, and it's a trick of his condition that events and people from his past are more real to him than what happened five minutes ago.

About the only thing that I have - or had, because it's failing me lately - is my memory. I had a really good memory. I was always terribly protective of that fact.

One of the strangest aspects of living with certain kinds of memory loss is knowing that the forgetting is happening.

My memory's pretty much gone.

I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well.

But I'm not as bad as Al Pacino - he doesn't even know what month it is half the time when he's working.

The terror dementia sufferers must feel is unimaginable, but the techniques they use to hide their difficulties - the ducking and diving and keeping the world laughing - are perfectly understandable.