The great tragedy of Alzheimer's disease, and the reason why we dread it, is that it leaves us with no defence, not even against those who love us.

In youth we take egregious risks because death has no reality for us. Youth goes caparisoned in immortality. It is only in middle age that we are shadowed by the awareness of the transitoriness of life.

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin.

we can forgive anything as long as it isn't done to us.

to look back on one's life is to experience the capriciousness of memory. ... the past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.

Can we ever break free of the devices and desires of our own hearts? Might not our conscience be telling us what we most want to hear?

We are often more merciful to our animals than we are to each other.