Philip K. Dick Quotes

'The Names' is a story about a woman who might feel that she's in a kind of maze. She's unable to find her way forward or out because she can't see the whole picture.

But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself. I cannot remember. She's been shorn of memory as brutally as she'd been shorn of her hair, without permission, without reason... Gone, all gone, she thought again wildly, no longer even sure what was gone, what she was mourning.

I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling

Hey, if you can't remember, don't worry about it. I'm having a few memory problems myself in this place. Little things like how long I've been here, what my purpose in life is, which feet to put my shoes on. Stuff like that.

I used to have a really sharp memory. And its loss has proven destabilizing from an identity perspective.

Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when.

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.

Sundown is often the worst time of day for people with dementia. They can become restless and difficult.

My great frustration is that, more and more, my memories come and go, and friends all my life are not recognized. Many of the things I say and do, I can no longer remember even right afterwards.

You suddenly find yourself somewhere and you wonder, how did I get in this room? That happens to me all the time, every day!

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.

You can't converse with Alzheimer's sufferers in the way you do with others; the dialogue tends to go round in circles.

Have you ever walked along a shoreline, only to have your footprints washed away? That's what Alzheimer's is like. The waves erase the marks we leave behind, all the sand castles. Some days are better than others.

I absolutely do not think that I have even a vague recollection of what normal life is like.

My grandfather had Alzheimer's. He would eat everything and anything that was around; then he wouldn't remember that he ate it and would demand to be fed again.

Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.

The Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.

They say that your powers of memory are at their peak when you're 26, and it's all downhill after that.

No matter how many vitamins you take, how much Pilates, you'll lose your keys, your hair and your memory.

After that, she wasn't sure what the game was or if she'd imagined it. All she knew was that she had lost.

I have no memory of climbing the stairs up to the roof. I don't even know how to get where I am, which is a problem since I'm going to have to get down, ideally in a way that doesn't involve dying.

The place I live in is a kind of maze and I keep seeking the exit or the home.

I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way.

Oh look at how she listens She says nothing of what she thinks She just goes stumbling through her memories Staring out on to Grey Street

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."