114 Quotes by Lisa Genova

And I have no control over which yesterdays I keep and which ones get deleted. This disease will not be bargained with.

More and more, she was experiencing a growing distance from her self-awareness. Her sense of Alice – what she knew and understood, what she liked and disliked, how she felt and perceived – was also like a soap bubble, ever higher in the sky and more difficult to identify, with nothing but the thinnest lipid membrane protecting it from popping into thinner air.

My yesterdays are disappearing, my tomorrows are uncertain, so what do I live for? I live for each day. I live in the moment.

It’s like you don’t get that she’s not gone yet, like you think her time left isn’t meaningful anymore. You’re acting like a selfish child.

Despite her self-reproach, she envied Anna, that she could do what Alice couldn’t – keep her children safe from harm. Anna would never have to sit opposite her daughter, her firstborn, and watch her struggle to comprehend the news that she would someday develop Alzheimer’s.

She didn’t have time for Alzheimer’s today.

She could always walk somewhere without him. Of course this somewhere had to be somewhere “safe.” She could walk to her office. But she didn’t want to go to her office. She felt bored, ignored, and alienated in her office. She felt ridiculous there. She didn’t belong there anymore. In all the expansive grandeur that was Harvard, there wasn’t room there for a cognitive psychology professor with a broken cognitive psyche.

Please don’t look at our scarlet A’s and write us off. Look us in the eye, talk directly to us. Don’t panic or take it personally if we make mistakes, because we will. We will repeat ourselves, we will misplace things, and we will get lost. We will forget your name and what you said two minutes ago. We will also try our hardest to compensate for and overcome our cognitive losses.

She’d been having a lot of trouble sleeping through the night lately, probably because she was napping a lot during the day. Or was she napping a lot during the day because she wasn’t sleeping well at night?