Best 1003 quotes in «memoir quotes» category

Many have come to understand that while reality and truth are not always the same, they do not necessarily oppose or preclude one another. The myths of Shiva, the lake and the mountain, Buddhist stories and visualisations, the feeling of a mountain rising: none of these need be literal in order to be considered truthful. Such moments simply point to a truth as complex as the people who seek to understand them.

Many of the people I write about were deliberately left out of the history books that we were forced to read in school. For me, that history was "written wrong" and needed to be corrected. My intention was to make them visible so they could be role models for others. To show how each, in his or her own way, dribbled gracefully around that obstacle in the narrow corridor.

Martin was very pro-American in his attitude and statements. When I knew him, he was divorced, alone and a Korean who had never lived in Korea—neither in what became North or South Korea. A man without a country.

Mary [Tyler Moore] was absolutely brilliant... She is a fabulous actress. She can do anything.

Mary the Canary lives in a cloud of perfume and colours. She's an auxiliary nurse by day and a country and western singer by night: bed pans and power ballass. She's so glamorous she makes Mrs Hart look plain. She is the other woman and I'm bring trained to hate her even though I've never met her.

mates, to my sisters and me, are seen mainly as shadows of the people they're involved with. they move. They're visible in direct sunlight. But because they don't have access to our emotional buttons-- because they can't make us twelve again, or five, and screaming-- they don't really count as players.

Mauve cream Kabuki actors use conceal dark circles under my eyes. I brush soothing sable bristles of coral blush across high cheekbones, smudge taupe color on eye lids, darken thick lashes, dot ash rose gloss across my lips. Heavy red frame glasses and rose lenses cover grey eyes. I rip the telephone from the wall and stumble, drunk and crying, to the door, batter the facing with the phone handle, counting arrhythmic phlegmatic beats. Splinters and fragments of wood fall to the floor, a lingering catarrh lying among pale turquoise and gold threads. The scent of roses and jasmine lingers. The sky and dot and window refracture. I look into the gold leaf mirror, pleased with the effect: A perfect face reflects no inner turmoil.

Maybe being broken helps you become a better person.

Maybe I'd die. Maybe I'd burn to ash in wind, or blacken like the pines. Charred skeletons, I'd add one to the count. I didn't feel scared. I didn't think to panic. The trail wasn't burning. I was raw, ripe for loving. I wasn't stopping.

Maybe some people are only ever meant to be missed.

May I see the beauty in others without denigrating my own.

Meditation and mindfulness are tools for working with the mind, but where they have led me is to a blossoming of the heart...

Meandering cows, tenacious bicyclers, belching taxis, rickshaws, fearless pedestrians and the occasional mobile ‘cigarette and sweets’ stand all fought our taxi for room on the narrow two-lane road turned local byway.

Membaca autobiografi atau memoir seolah-olah terlibat dalam dialog dengan narator yang menjadi jurucakap pengarang: mendengar secara langsung cerita serta pendapat tentang zamannya dengan gaya pengucapan peribadinya. Gaya bahasa dan idiosinkrasi penampilannya menghantar karyanya mirip cereka, tetapi fakta dan kebenaran subjeknya akan menyeretnya menjadi mirip sejarah, dan hakikat inilah yang berkemungkinan melahirkan memoir sebagai wacana intelektual yang artistik; menggugah dan tidak menjemukan.

Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life.

[Memory]... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as having happened together. The actual year or season or time of day shifts to a different one. Many details are lost, usually in ways that serve the self in its present situation, not the self of ten or twenty or forty years ago when the remembered event took place. And even the fresh memory, the 'original,' is not reliable in a documentary sense....Memory, in short, is not a record of the past but an evolving myth of understanding the psyche spins from its engagement with the world.

Memory was my drug of choice. -Pea Hicks

Memories of beloved places - not necessarily places we lived in for a long time but places we were attached to - are the ones we remember in most vivid detail.

Mine is a gruesome job, but for a scientist with a love for the mechanics of the human body, a great one.

Mistakes? That's why they put erasers on pencils.

Momentarily, I could forget the sorrow of my absent daughter by being the daughter who was present.

More than ever, I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity to cope with change.

Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn't do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives. They have seen themselves in extreme circumstances and, in that, they have seen their own extremes.

Most Michigan residents can get a copy of their birth certificates within weeks by simply placing an order online. But for Detroit native Rudy Owens, attempts to obtain his birth records took decades of legal battles. Why? Because he is an adoptee. Owens is the author of a new book You Don’t Know How Lucky You are: An Adoptee’s Journey Through the American Adoption Experience. (From, Michigan Radio, Stateside, June 11, 2018)

Mr. Schlubb, the pear-shaped PE teacher, sent us all out to run half a dozen laps around a preposterously enormous cinder track. For the Greenwood kids—all of us white, marshmallowy, innately unphysical, squinting unfamiliarly in the bright sunshine—it was a shock to the system of an unprecedented order.

Men ought to be a four-letter word! Menn!

Much older than myself, Martin was a distinguished and handsome career journalist who worked at the same newspaper I did.

Music is not my life. My life is music.

Murphy's law inverted: What can go right, will go right.

Murphy's law inverted: What can go right, will go right. (Works if you're an optimist.)

My father's haunting memories of war had been transformed into my own haunting memories. Such is the power of war and memory.

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as "petite and unopinionated". My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes "short and bossy.

My father has the proper degrees and framed pictures on the walls, though they're mostly taped over with photos of children, family and friends. Images from the past and present and trips and experiences combined with files on the floor – it's a happening or collage in progress.

My fear of being real, of being seen, paralyzes me into silence. I crave the touch and the connection, but I’m not always brave enough to open my hand and reach out. This is the great challenge: to be seen, accepted, and loved, I must first reveal, offer, and surrender.

My handbag turned into a diaper bag for the chronically ill.

My malady was submission. The symptom: my compliance. The antidote was loud clear boundaries.

My meal arrived. It was a bowl of tepid, green curried water with two spinach leaves floating in it. The waiter called it 'vegetable soup'. I called it inedible slop.

My motto? Don’t trust someone who is just as cagey as yourself." "What kind of detective are you?” “A lousy one and proud of it. I write, remember?” She looked down at her hand & laughed. “Berretta doesn’t make lighters.” "Why I was a writer! My life revolved around fiction. I could make something up" "She looked down at her hand & laughed. “Berretta doesn’t make lighters.” "So they're not Tolstoy, they're a little shorter...Okay, okay a lot. Go ahead, read my mystery series anyway." "A detective has their boundaries especially me. So mine shifted occasionally...okay a lot" “Beat it, Buster. My temper and this mace have a hair trigger.” “Interference could be lethal.” I got right up in his face, hissing, “Don’t push me, I’m hormonal.” I'm not really a lousy detective, just rough around the edges.

My mother has always loved piano music and hungered to play. When she was in her early sixties, she retired from her job as a computer programmer so that she could devote herself more fully to the piano. As she had done with her dog obsession, she took her piano education to an extreme. She bought not one, not two, but three pianos. One was the beautiful Steinway B, a small grand piano she purchased with a modest inheritance left by a friend of her parents’. She photocopied all of her music in a larger size so she could see it better and mounted it on manila folders. She practiced for several hours every day. When she wasn’t practicing the piano she was talking about the piano. I love pianos, too, and wrote an entire book about the life of one piano, a Steinway owned by the renowned pianist Glenn Gould. And I shared my mother’s love for her piano. During phone conversations, I listened raptly as she told me about the instrument’s cross-country adventures. Before bringing the Steinway north, my mother had mentioned that she was considering selling it. I was surprised, but instead of reminding her that, last I knew, she was setting it aside for me, I said nothing, unable to utter the simple words, “But, Mom, don’t you remember your promise?” If I did, it would be a way of asking for something, and asking my mother for something was always dangerous because of the risk of disappointment.

My mother overstated the dangers of the world – invented threats. And so I saw: Starbursts’ hoof-made gelatin never gave me mad cow. Mad cow was not a threat to me. And so I thought: most risks weren’t truly real.

My path, beyond doubt or denial. I just hadn’t looked toward it. I wasn’t lost. I’d always known the way. If I’d only allowed myself to look. I had never been lost, only scared.

My professional life had started and here I was at a professional dinner full of uninhibited drinking.

Mentre tornavo a casa a piedi col pesante manoscritto, ripensai a quella volta che il professor Kerry aveva cominciato una lezione scrivendo alla lavagna: "Chi scrive la storia?". Lì per lì mi era sembrata una domanda strana. L'idea che avevo degli storici non era umana: erano personaggi simili a mio padre, più profeti che uomini, le cui concezioni sul passato così come sul futuro non potevano essere messe in discussione né tantomeno ampliate. Adesso, mentre attraversavo il King's College all'ombra dell'enorme cappella, la mia vecchia diffidenza mi sembrò quasi buffa. Chi scrive la storia? Pensai. La scrivo io.

My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child.

My schedule became tighter than a corset on a Victorian prostitute.

My shipmates and I only grasped our roles on the very superficial level we were taught. We were fighting the bad guys. They were the bad guys because we were told that they were the bad guys. We had to control, infiltrate, and shove our authority around the world because we were its greatest nation. We had the shiniest ships, the biggest guns, the deadliest weapons, and the cockiest egos. And if we thought otherwise, we were vicious traitors. The military condemns rebels, thinkers, and doubt. The military loves obedience, loyalty, and oblivion. Its core values are, after all, “Honor, Courage, and Commitment.

Mystery, I’d read somewhere, is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.

...my sisters are tough. Our strength is in our laughter (Dan)

My words to Anna, as we stood contemplating the Scuola Grande di San Marco, moments before entering Venice Hospital, came true: 'With a façade like that, I could even accept having a deformed child.' I accepted Tito's cerebral palsy. I accepted it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I accepted it with delight. I accepted it with enthusiasm. I accepted it with love.

My story begins with a question.