Best 1003 quotes in «memoir quotes» category

Do your parents know you’re here?' asked the lady at social Services. ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I want to know about children’s homes.’ I had to stand on my toes to see over the reception desk.

Dream the Painting and Wake up and Paint the Dream.

During these three months I have gone through much; I mean, I have gone through much in myself; and now there are the things I am going to see and go through. There will be much to be written.

Each day has the potential of being your best day. You decide what each day will bring.

Each generation identifies with a small group of people said to have lived lives exemplifying the vices and virtues of that generation. If one were to choose a trial lawyer whose life reflected the unique characteristics of America’s “Wild West” of a criminal justice system in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, that person likely would be my father. New York City of the 1960s until the turn of the 21st century was the world’s epicenter of organized and white-collar crime. During those four decades, the most feared mafia chiefs, assassins, counterfeiters, Orthodox Jewish money launderers, defrocked politicians of every stripe, and Arab bankers arriving in the dead of night in their private jets, sought the counsel of one man: my father, Jimmy La Rossa. Once a Kennedy-era prosecutor, Brooklyn-born Jimmy La Rossa became one of the greatest criminal trial lawyers of his day. He was the one man who knew where all of the bodies were buried, and everyone knew it. It seemed incomprehensible that Jimmy would one day just disappear from New York. Forever. After stealing my dying father from New York Presbyterian Hospital to a waiting Medevac jet, the La Rossa Boys, as we became known, spent the next five years in a place where few would look for two diehard New Yorkers: a coastal town in the South Bay of Los Angeles, aptly named Manhattan Beach. While I cooked him his favorite Italian dishes and kept him alive using the most advanced medical equipment and drugs, my father and I documented our notorious and cinematic life together as equal parts biography and memoir. This is our story.

Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album.

Each person in the group said something except for me. My silence became noticed. About halfway through the meeting I started to think, I've got to talk. Today, I've got to talk. Fear racked me so bad that sweat ran down my sides. I thought, After the curly-haired woman stops talking I'll raise my hand. A man with a cocky smile told the curly woman that her story was nothing compared to his, he'd been passed out cold from heroin and God knows what, and I wanted to tell him to quit glorifying hinself. I was just about to say the words, a few faces turned toward me as if they could sense my imminent speech, when a man across the circle interrupted. The opportunity passed; what I wanted to say wouldn't fit now. I tilted on the back two legs of the chair and waited for my desire to speak and be noticed and be part of the group to travel back through my nervous system. Up the synapses condemnation rushed: Why couldn't I spit something out like a normal person?

Ensuring that our home planet is healthy and life sustaining is an overwhelming priority that undercuts all other human activities. The ship must first float. Our failure to grasp these fundamental tenants of existence will be our undoing. And one thing is for certain. No calvary is going to come charging to our rescue. We are going to have to rescue ourselves or die trying. Workable solutions are urgently needed. Saving seals and tigers or fighting yet another oil pipeline through a wilderness area, while laudable, is merely shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. The real issue is our elementary accord with Earth and the plant and animal kingdoms has to be revitalized and re-understood. The burning question is, How?

Even now, I see his damp hair crowding at his forehead. His eyes, cerulean, the same as my mother's. Him, favoring the skin of any water to me. I remember him moving with it, and staying. That ripe light and intermittence. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever stop looking for him there.

Even sentenced to twenty-five years in prison Ted didn’t get what he deserved. Maybe his prison mates would give it to him.

Even now, every job I get, I worry that it will be my last. I think becoming a washed-up hag is sort of my destiny. So if you see a wrinkled old bitch wearing a tattered fur and chain-smoking in an off-Broadway back alley...that’s just me. Starting four years from now.

Even now, I am anxious about the naked thoughts that I have shared. The observations are blisteringly honest and of course they have to be.

Every day is a new beginning, the building of a habit. Every action is a step in some direction. There is no pause in living.

Everyone has a story to tell. The longer you live, the more stories you collect. Learn to tell your stories well and you'll earn the title of Storyteller. Write those stories down, find a good publisher, and you'll earn the title of Author.

Every book has to wait for the right time to be read and understood.

Every crossroad in life has four options – quit, adapt, proceed, or accept, but quitting is a dead-end.

Everyone has a colorful life. You just have to get out your crayons.

Everyone's a knucklehead at one point or another.

Everything bleeds into everything and fiction is just this funny desperate little attempt to staunch the bleeding.

Everything around me affirmed there was nothing else I could do – yet everything inside me cried that I was not doing enough.

Facts you can bend. Memories are much stronger things.

Everything we have, everything we are, is a gift. How can we judge and shame ourselves if this is true?

Experiences are neither good nor bad, they just are. It is what we do with them, what we take away from them, and how we respond to them that determines the effect they have on our lives.

Everything I write is a rebound.

Expectation is the dirtiest word in a traveler's vocabulary.

Explore, Experience, Then Push Beyond.

Families that feel together, heal together.

Family is an important part of a person's life. The family is the first start of life's motivations and the things with-in this world, other than religious teachings. A broken home sometimes make broken lives that sometimes can be patched over a period of time with the right spiritual up lifting’s. Never, never, let the wrong influences in life destroy a family bind. STAY WISE! Amen and peace unto you. Quoted by me: Patricia A.E. Hampton

Find It, Live It, Love It.

Father, be near as we are surrounded by this cloud of deep suffering. Open our eyes to see that you are all things, the light and the darkness, not only those things that seem good in our eyes, but the horrifying unexplainable. Wrap us up inside of the cloud and reveal the mysteries that can only be learned in places of sorrow, that when we walk out we will be as Moses, transformed by the shadow and beaming with the radiant light of your glory. Give us the strength to love on, though our hearts are broken.

Finally the dawn came, the sky fringed with pink, and the sun bright as a coin in a spill of rising red.

Fire is not essential. Fire is warm comfort. From fire, cultures are born.

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First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert's been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her, I'm jumping on the canopied bed while she cries, she's pulling out drawers looking for a handkerchief, Now, he's all right, the man say, they think, patting her shoulder, I'm jumping higher, I'm not allowed, they think he saved old man Mayes, the bed slats dislodge and the mattress collapses. My mother lunges for me. Many traveled to Reidsville for the event, but my family did not witness Willis Barnes's electrocution, From kindergarten through high school, Donette, the murderer's daughter, was in my class. We played together at recess. Sometimes she'd spit on me.

For a long time, I was the girl who believed nothing good would ever come her way. So much so that I could will the negative to come before the good could even make it to my location.

For me, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is like a good friend. A necessary girlfriend, but with chronic PMS. A temperamental – and even volatile – friend who does not play well with others and whom I dearly love. It’s a strange relationship.

For all my life, I had been passive when faced with dangers. I was stunned as I swam to find that I had, for the first time in my history, asserted myself and been truly heard—respected. It felt monumental, I was buzzing with adrenaline. It was as if I’d become someone else entirely. I had escaped a kidnapper. It finally felt real. My body unclenched tension in the balmy pool. I was proud of the strength I’d found. I was the one who asserted he take me back; I caused him to listen. I was no longer a passive Doll Girl, trapped. This was me learning I could trust my voice—I’d used it, and it finally worked! I was triumphant. This escape showed me: I had grown, and grown vividly.

For me, adoption was grief in reverse.

For so long, we woman have turned our anger inwards, redirecting it towards ourselves and allowing it to manifest as shame. We have told ourselves, instead, that we are sad or hormonal or stressed, but these have been placeholder emotions. And for so long we have been encouraged to do this by a misogynistic culture that realises female anger is dangerous not because it is the product of mental imbalance but because it is fuel. Female anger is power.

For the first time I realized adults could back themselves into corners so remote that love, or its memory, could no longer reach them.

For this entire walk, my desire had ashamed me, as if my wanting to be kissed that night mitigated the fault of Junior's sudden deafness. I'd been given stacks of reasons to blame myself for an act of violence committed by another. I had blamed my flirting for his subsequent felony. My college taught me: my rape was my shame. Everyone I'd trusted asked only what I might have done to let it happen. In my gut, I'd always believed I'd caused it. I finally questioned it.

Fortunately the Omanis are generally very friendly and in no time at all, I had a knight in shining white dishdasha offering to help me.

For now I sit on my final island of the present as my radius of memory shrinks; lost already are the islands of work, of old friendships...Other islands fade as I brood upon them.

For the longest time I was so sick I didn't have the strength or inclination to read, but looking at my books stacked up on the bedside table was comforting, like having old friends sitting in the room with me, friends who didn't require anything of me, friends who brought me great pleasure just with their presence, waiting until I could engage with them again.... bibliophiles know the inanimate pleasure of the friendship with books.

FROM a six-year-old: Told by a well-meaning friend, ‘Alex, do you know what the one thing is that the more you give, the more you get back? It’s love, Alex.’ To which Alex asked, ‘What about pain?

From my first stab at second base, I became obsessively concerned for my vaginal upkeep. I began shaving the day after I felt my first tongue down my throat. The first buzz was a disaster, causing horrifically itchy dull razor breakout that made me look like I made love to a poison ivy bush. Whenever I thought there was a chance of unveiling my privates, I smothered every breakout with the same foundation I used for the occasional teenage acne face breakouts.

From one end to the other I have identified with various forms of spirituality. I was a Jew, then a God-hater. I was an atheist, then a Christian, for which I was called a traitor.

From that moment, and for the rest of my life, my mother's words--perceptive and many others--have helped me to be the thing she saw and named in me.

From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn’t walked away from school, through devastating beauty alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, met rattlesnakes and bears, fording frigid and remote rivers as deep as I am tall—feeling terror and the gratitude that followed the realization that I’d survived rape—I’d have remained lost, maybe for my whole life. The trail had shown me how to change. This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation. I wrote it.

Free love, man, Free Love! Which, by the way, was the single greatest concept a young man has ever heard. About three years late, women got wise an my frustration returned to normal levels.