Patti Davis Quotes (19 Quotes)

I did what most writers do when something happens that's overwhelming, fascinating, moving, all of that. I didn't know what else to do about it except write about it.

I speak for many others when I say that none of us believe a cure is just around the corner. We believe it's around a very wide bend.

You know, if you hang around this earth long enough you really see how things come full circle.

Laura Bush went on national television during the week of my father's funeral and spoke out against embryonic stem cell research, pointing out that where Alzheimer's is concerned, we don't have proof that stem-cell treatment would be effective.

Even if the Bush Administration had flung open the gates to stem-cell research years ago, we would not be at the point of offering treatment today. Christopher Reeve would still have been taken from us. But we would be closer.

I felt that the best I could do for my father, and the best I could do for myself, and my mother and my family was to stay open to the experience, and learn whatever I could at every step of the way as it was going on.

Acknowledging that the death of a former president of Reagan's stature would be a big unwieldy one -- a world event, ... grab onto the massive grief around us and go home at night to the shape of the grief inside us.

After September 11, I got to understand a little bit of his deep love for this country.

I thought the best thing that I could do would be to clean up my own act, in terms of whatever ... childhood wounds were left,

My father started growing very quiet as Alzheimer's started claiming more of him. The early stages of Alzheimer's are the hardest because that person is aware that they're losing awareness. And I think that that's why my father started growing more and more quiet.

I heard his stories about ice skating as a kid along this river, that went on for miles, and miles and miles, and in winter when the river had frozen.

And as far as false hope, there is no such thing. There is only hope or the absence of hope-nothing else.

Christopher Reeve understood that... everything begins with hope. His vision of walking again, his belief that he would be able to in his lifetime, towered over his broken body.

My father never feared death. He never saw it as an ending. I don't know why Alzheimer's was allowed to steal so much of my father before releasing him into the arms of death. But I know that at his last moment, when he opened his eyes -- eyes that had not opened for many, many days -- and looked at my mother, he showed us that neither disease nor death can conquer love.

I had this odd sibling rivalry with America.

America had taken my father from me. And over most of the years of his illness, I gradually started feeling this support system from this country who-people grieving along with us.

The memories stayed with him for so long, and stayed vivid. And it didn't matter to me that he'd already repeated that before. I could hear it forever.

I needed him as a citizen of this country and that we as a country needed him. Because he would have known what to say to bring us some comfort.

Some people, when they die, leave so much life behind that we wonder how they did it.