Best 1003 quotes in «memoir quotes» category

You are not yourself in autobiography. It is never going to be you, it is only words on a page. Memories are unreliable, so adding the magic of imagination will make your story come alive.

You can fill a glass full to the brim with milk, and fill another glass of the same size brim full of popcorn, and then you can put all the popcorn kernel by kernel into the milk, and the milk will not run over. You cannot do this with bread. Popcorn and milk are the only two things that will go into the same place.

You can make a difference in another person's life and not realize it, just by giving them One Moment of your time, One Memory to recall, One Motion that tells them they are not alone! OM!

You cannot go poking skeletons in the closet without making maggots wriggle." - Springfield Road

You can only move if you are actually in the moment. You have to be where you are to get where you need to go.

You don't need everyone to like you, just the right one(s)!

You don’t need extra food, extra water, extra clothing for extra warmth – anything extra. You don’t need soap or deodorant. Everything you carry you should need daily.

You don't need to retire to a cloister or the desert for years on end to experience a true dark night; you don't even have to be pursuing any particular "spiritual" path. Raising a challenged child, or caring for a failing parent for years on end, is at least as purgative as donning robes and shaving one's head; to endure a mediocre work situation for the sake of the paycheck that sustains a family demands at least as much in the way of daily surrender to years of pristine silence in a monastery. No one can know in advance how and where the night will come, and what form God's darkness will take.

You had nightmares every night for a long time and screamed in Korean words, but we didn't know what they meant. I asked someone who knew Korean, and he said it was um-ma um-ma, the word for mom.

You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life.

You have what it takes! Believe! You are the one with the dream. You own it. And you will walk through the open doors. Nothing can stop you.. Risk, even if you make mistakes. So live with faith and abandon. Have some fun. You are being carried...

You know Becky, you haven't been the same since that crowbar fell on your head." - - said to me by my mother after I eloped with a guy I'd known for about 30 days, when I was 18 years old!

You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it. If you won the Irish Sweepstakes and bought a house that needed furniture would you fill it with bits and pieces of rubbish? Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish from the cinemas, it will rot in your head. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.

You kids were all planned, you were just planned really, really quickly.

You know Becky, you haven't been the same since that crowbar fell on your head." - spoken by my mother after I eloped with a guy I'd known for about a month, when I was 18 years old!

Your past doesn't dictate what your future will be.

Your earliest thoughts, remnants of how you lived inside yourself as a small boy, You can remember only some of it, isolated bits and pieces, brief flashes of recognition that surge up in you unexpectedly at random moments - brought on by the smell of something, or the touch of something, or the way the light falls on something in the here and now of adulthood. At least you think you can remember, you believe you remember, but perhaps you are not remembering at all, or remembering only a later remembrance of what you think you thought in that distant time which is all but lost to you now.

Your people understand the forest: how the animals behave, where to find them, and so on. I want something similar—but instead of the forest as a whole, I want to understand dragons. They are not only here, you know; there are dragons in the savannah—” Mekeesawa nodded. “Well, there are more than that, all over the world. They live in the mountains and on the plains and maybe even in the ocean. I want to know them as you know the creatures of this forest.” “But why?” Mekeesawa asked. His eyes were still merry with laughter, but his question was serious. “You don’t live in all those places.” With the amount of time I have spent traveling in my life, one might make the argument that I do live in all those places, if only temporarily. But Mekeesawa’s point was a good one, and not easily dismissed. The Moulish understood the creatures of the Green Hell because their survival depended on it; my survival did not depend on my traveling the globe to find dragons. (Indeed, it has on more than one occasion nearly been detrimental to my life expectancy.) How could I answer him? Thinking back on the matter now, it is possible my only true answer to that question is now in its second volume, with more to come. These memoirs are not only an accounting of my life; they are an accounting *for* it.

You know you're having a bad week when you call 911, the paramedics come to your house, and one of them notices you've rearranged your furniture.

You never get second chances on first experiences.

You're inside at the kitchen table wolfing cereal when she says, 'you have accomplished a great thing.' You say, 'and what would that be, bwana?' Meredith says, 'you're your same self.' The truth of this flickers past you, gnat-like. For years, you've felt only half done inside, cobbled together by paper clips, held intact by gum wads and school paste. But something solid is starting to assemble inside you. You say, 'I am my same self. That's not nothing, is it?' That catchphrase will serve as a touchstone for years to come, an instant you'll return to after traveling the far roads. Like everything else, Meredith thought it up. You were there solely for embellishment and witness: you were there to watch.

Your heartbeat is so different from his," I whisper it; he has to ask me to repeat myself. I explain, "My father…his heartbeat was so fast. I could feel it, racing…it was like his heartbeat shook my whole body. Your heart…it's steady. It feels safe. It's calming me down." And so we stand, and I cry, and listen to his heart until I am calm again, and then we get back to cleaning.

Your past mistakes are meant to guide you, not define you.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.

A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.

You wanted to live inside the lines where the ordinariness of everything would protect you from the dragons that lay at the edge of the map ready to blow fire in your face if you strayed off course, to the edge of the known world.

A Diogenesian search for an honest person would rarely lead to the author of a memoir.

I could have written a misery memoir and instead I tried to make it funny. I never complained.

A producer came to me about doing a memoir, and at first I thought, "Well, it's a little bland." But then I realized that almost everything that's happened to me was the result of being in the right place at the right time. And I thought "Well, luck has a lot to do with it," so I wrote it from that perspective.

Book Everything is Flammable is an odd format though, not quite a diary and not quite a memoir. I was working on it as it was happening. This was gratifying to me.

I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.

I don't like talking about myself; I like to let the music be the spokesperson for me. So doing a memoir and all that chronological 'and then this happened and then blah blah' doesn't appeal to me that much. I think there's more mystique in what you don't know about.

I was inspired by my life. I was inspired by the lives of many women doctors around me. So [Memoirs of a Woman Doctor ] is a mixture.

I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

Of all the many memoirs by former Soviet officials, Palazchenko's is among the best written and also the most objective. Even his descriptions of U.S. policy are more accurate and judicious than those of some American scholars.

Memoir is about handing over you life to someone and saying, This is what I went through, this is who I am, and maybe you can learn something from it.

I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.

Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.

Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that's the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could.

One thing about humans is that we all have them - lifestories. We live by and through them. But writers of memoir are particularly good at bringing literary strategies and form to experience (at least the good ones are).

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

When Goldie Hawn wrote her memoirs, no one said Goldie Hawn was snitching. When Jane Fonda wrote her memoirs, no one said Jane Fonda was snitching.

The memoir as a somewhat indistinct form is absolutely true. So many of the memoirs I've read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir and the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.

The stupidest thing that a writer can do is write a memoir I think, unless it's right before you die -- maybe.

This week Sarah Palin's memoir became a bestseller. It's not even out yet. It's being translated into English.

Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

Absolutely devout in her complete care of my body, she had only taught me to be weak and voiceless. But I had unlearned that lesson. Our enmeshment no longer felt to me like proof of love. I was no longer willing to permit this silencing. Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing—able—to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed her to help me, to take care of things for me—and to save me—but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it.