Top 100 Lisa Genova Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t aim for perfect. Aim for complete. Perfection is an unattainable illusion.”

— Lisa Genova

2. “Time’s a funny thing, bending, warping, stretching, and compressing, all depending on perspective.”

— Lisa Genova

3. “You are either Now Here or Nowhere.”

— Lisa Genova

4. “What’s the saying? Not forgiving someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.”

— Lisa Genova

5. “My yesterdays are disappearing, and my tomorrows are uncertain, so what do I live for? I live for each day. I live in the moment. Some tomorrow soon, I’ll forget that I stood before you and gave this speech. But just because I’ll forget it some tomorrow doesn’t mean that I didn’t live every second of it today. I will forget today, but that doesn’t mean that today didn’t matter.”

— Lisa Genova

6. “Every note played is a life and death.”

— Lisa Genova

7. “Be creative, be useful, be practical, be generous and finish big.”

— Lisa Genova

8. “Her ability to use language, that thing that most separates humans from animals, was leaving her, and she was feeling less and less human as it departed. She’s said a tearful good-bye to okay some time ago.”

— Lisa Genova

9. “But I am not what I say or what I do or what I remember. I am fundamentally more than that.”

— Lisa Genova

10. “They talked about her as if she weren’t sitting in the wing chair, a few feet away. They talked about her, in front of her, as if she were deaf. They talked about her, in front of her, without including her, as if she had Alzheimer’s disease.”

— Lisa Genova

11. “Every breath is a risk. Love is why we breathe.”

— Lisa Genova

12. “Attention, rehearsal, elaboration, or emotional significance was needed if perceived information was to be pushed beyond the recent memory space into longer-term storage, else it would be quickly and naturally discarded with the passage of time.”

— Lisa Genova

13. “I will forget today, but that doesn’t mean that today didn’t matter.”

— Lisa Genova

14. “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.”

— Lisa Genova

15. “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?”

— Lisa Genova

16. “Alice: I miss myself. John: I miss you too, Ali, so much.”

— Lisa Genova

17. “This is the best anyone can hope for in life. Someone you love to stagger through the hard times with.”

— Lisa Genova

18. “I decide I’m not dead because I can hear the sound of the rain hitting the roof of the car. I’m alive because I’m listening to the rain, and the rain becomes the hand of God strumming his fingers on the roof, deciding what to do.”

— Lisa Genova

19. “I used to know how the mind handled language, and I could communicate what I knew. I used to be someone who knew a lot. No one asks for my opinion or advice anymore. I miss that. I used to be curious and independent and confident. I miss being sure of things. There’s no peace in being unsure of everything all the time. I miss doing everything easily. I miss being a part of what’s happening. I miss feeling wanted. I miss my life and my family. I loved my life and family.”

— Lisa Genova

20. “This disease will not be bargained with. I can’t offer it the names of the United States presidents in exchange for the names of my children. I can’t give it the names of the state capitals and keep the memories of my husband.”

— Lisa Genova

21. “Everything she did and love, everything she was, required language.”

— Lisa Genova

22. “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.”

— Lisa Genova

23. “He used to tell her everything, and she used to listen in rapt attention. She wondered when that had changed and who’d lost interest first, he in the telling or she in the listening.”

— Lisa Genova

24. “In Poland, Chopin is as revered as Pope John Paul II and God. Poland’s Holy Trinity.”

— Lisa Genova

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

— Lisa Genova

26. “Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? – Rumi.”

— Lisa Genova

27. “But just because I’ll forget it some tomorrow doesn’t mean that I didn’t live every second of it today. I will forget today, but that doesn’t mean that today didn’t matter.”

— Lisa Genova

28. “I wish I could see you more, too, but I’d never let you stop living your life for me.”

— Lisa Genova

29. “Take what you’ve learned and love someone again. Find someone to love and love without condition. This is why we’re all here.”

— Lisa Genova

30. “Would he choose to stand with her on the plateau or push her down the hill?”

— Lisa Genova

31. “And while a bald head and a looped ribbon were seen as badges of courage and hope, her reluctant vocabulary and vanishing memories advertised mental instability and impending insanity. Those with cancer could expect to be supported by their community. Alice expected to be an outcast.”

— Lisa Genova

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

— Lisa Genova

33. “She didn’t have time for Alzheimer’s today.”

— Lisa Genova

34. “He left the room, unable to watch her standing there, naked with her underwear on her head, laughing at her own absurd madness.”

— Lisa Genova

35. “Why? What’s wrong with being emotional about this? why is that a negative thing? Why isn’t the emotional decision the right decision?” asked the woman who wasn’t crying.”

— Lisa Genova

36. “Normal’s overrated.”

— Lisa Genova

37. “Alice looked around the room. Everyone’s eyes were glued to the screen. They listened intently as Eric elaborated on Alice’s comment. Many continued nodding. She felt victorious and a little smug. The fact that she had Alzheimer’s didn’t mean that she was no longer capable of thinking analytically. The fact that she had Alzheimer’s didn’t mean that she didn’t deserve to sit in that room among them. The fact that she had Alzheimer’s didn’t mean that she no longer deserved to be heard.”

— Lisa Genova

38. “She almost thought she’d said the words aloud, but she hadn’t. They remained trapped in her head, but not because they were barricaded by plaques and tangles. She just couldn’t say them aloud.”

— Lisa Genova

39. “I’ve been so focused on what’s horrible and unfair and terrifying about my condition that I hadn’t acknowledged what is positive about my condition, as if the positive had been sitting quietly by itself on the far edge of the left side of my condition, there but completely ignored.”

— Lisa Genova

40. “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.”

— Lisa Genova

41. “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.”

— Lisa Genova

42. “Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all.” – Emily Dickinson.”

— Lisa Genova

43. “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.”

— Lisa Genova

44. “Love isn’t measured by the number of hours a person logs.”

— Lisa Genova

45. “Our brains don’t remember everything, but maybe what they remember is enough. And yet even when the meaningful is forgotten, memory doesn’t define what it means to be human.”

— Lisa Genova

46. “Forgetting happens. If you stress about it, it’ll happen even more.”

— Lisa Genova

47. “The parts of your brain that are now activated include the same neurons in your visual cortex that would be activated if you were actually looking.”

— Lisa Genova

48. “We frequently invent new information, often inaccurate, to fill in gaps in our memories so that the narrative feels more complete or pleasing.”

— Lisa Genova

49. “Our brains don’t remember everything, but maybe what they remember is enough.”

— Lisa Genova

50. “You don’t need memory to love or feel loved.”

— Lisa Genova