Best 1003 quotes in «memoir quotes» category

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

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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

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

Besides, we were fifteen, and we couldn't get our feelings to match up with our brains. So we went with our feelings.

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

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

A basic reality of life is that we all struggle. We hurt and have hurt other people. We all feel lost sometimes. This isn’t all we are, but it is a part of who we are. The only question I have when I’m with someone is, “Can they admit it? And will they let me admit it too?

A bookshop is a peaceful sanctuary of silent voices waiting to heard

Actually, we shot it over two days and the ghost of Danny DeVito was devastatingly present the whole time.

A favorite pastime of soldiers on long mounted patrols was testing each other with impossible hypotheticals. They were an endearing yet vulgar form of moral drama, but only because the alternative was to contemplate being blown up by an illiterate goat herder’s morning project. “What would you rather do, have sex with your sister or shoot your mother?” “Would you rather pick up a baby with a pitchfork, or throw a paraplegic in a fire?” In one form or another, these young men were weighing the relative value of human life in real terms, perhaps as a surrogate for murkier thoughts that might otherwise be in the forefront, such as, “Why am I risking my life in this wasteland?” or “Whose life is worth more, that of my best friend in the gun turret or of some Iraqi kid I’ve never met?” It passed the time.

After consciously enduring a twelve-inch knitting needle navigated into the unseen recesses of my pelvis and almost passing out at the sensation of my hip inflating with fluid and somehow clinging to my sanity through the hour-long, migraine-inducing blare of the imaging contraption, which resembled a compact wind tunnel, possessed the amplification capability of a Marshall stack, and pushed my patience beyond the limits of superhuman endurance, I was informed by my orthopedist that the image of my still-smoldering hip had revealed, and I quote, “just a little inflammation.” In the world of orthopedic medicine, “a little inflammation” apparently qualifies as sound diagnosis.

After giving it some thought, I've decided to name my monkey mind Ricky Bobby. I was thinking about Latin names like Javier, but I don't want to make my jumping, distractable self sound mysterious and sexy. Ricky Bobby makes me laugh. A name like that seems silly, not strong. Just a goofy little thing that doesn't know what to do with its hands, likes to go fast, and loves tiny, infant, baby Jesus.

A garden is never finished. In that sense it is like the human world and all human undertakings.

After twelve years of trying, I just decided to stop missing.

A lifelong movie I already knew the ending to

All family stories are important, just as all people are important, and they deserve to be passed along.

Allowance grants us the permission to be perfect in our imperfection.

All of my secrets and scars and wishes and dreams can live together in this one body without shame, without blame, and without fear. I am all loved, all accepted, and all in service to God. In his eyes, regardless of what I did or didn’t do today, I am loved. I am His, so I am enough.

Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells us his story, I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differentials calculus. It was exalting to search and find, or create, the right word, that is, commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least clutter.

A marriage, willy-nilly, requires you to trust that your spouse will tell your story truthfully and lovingly when you are no longer around to tell it yourself.

A memoir, at its heart, is written in order to figure out who you are.

A memoir is the lost inheritance.

And Goneville? It is a name that kept coming up as I was writing this book, and each time its meaning shifted a little. It's almost Gonville, the suburb of Whanganui where Johnny Devlin, New Zealand's first rock 'n'roll star, grew up, so arguably the birthplace of New Zealand rock 'n'roll. But it is also an imaginary place that might be every obscure New Zealand town that every obscure New Zealand band ever played.

And I came to recognize that, no matter how difficult the reality, you mustn't let yourself be beaten. You must have a strong will. You have to summon what you know is right from your innermost depths and follow it.

And I was cooking for three, and teaching, and taking care of a man who’d just collapsed in my house; learning to cook like June Cleaver didn’t exactly seem an option.

And of course that was an Amaryllis that was never going to exist, one that I could never talk to or thank. I longed for her, even though I only knew her through her words.

And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path – the one, natural, trodden way.

And the idea of light unexplainably produced out of nothing was haunting, it shook me. A flat drab mountain could produce its own light, no one in this whole world knows why, and if that was possible then of course there must be other things that seemed impossible that weren’t, and so anything—great and terrible—felt possible to me now.

And there were the warm spaces in the music I loved the most, openings through which I could enter and lay my burdens down. There, behind the groove and riding on the melody, I was complete and free.

Anger tried to help me feel better about myself by pushing the blame onto someone else.

An intensely gripping narrative...expertly crafted and totally addictive...a must read!

Another note to self; turn cellphone to silent when you’re trying to be sneaky.

Anyone can choose to have success, but only the patient ones will get rewarded by it. Be relentless in chasing your dreams.

Anyone who thinks he's too small to make a difference has never been bit by a mosquito", I'd tell people.

As a dyslexic with rapid thought, my hands often fly over the page way too fast, and my typing isn’t much better.

As I travelled south through Europe everything got bigger. This applied to nice things like fruit-the nectarines and tomatoes were about six times as large in Greece as they were in Britain for example. But the principle also applied to unpleasant things, like spiders, and worms, and all other nameless and horrifying insects and arachnids of Greece.

As Samson demonstrated, going bald ruins lives.

As well as writing, 2004 saw my first attempt at wine making: the elixir of life. Unfortunately, my effort tasted more like the elixir of death.

At a crucial point in my early twenties, being able to end a pregnancy had restored to me what I regarded as a normal life. I remember that it saved me.

autism is more like retina patterns than measles

Banyak hal yang dapat dipelajari di jalan dan tidak pernah diajarkan di sekolah formal manapun. Traveling adalah tentang pelajaran hidup untuk membuka mata mengamati dari perspektif yang berbeda, melihat dari sudut pandang yang bukan biasa digunakan.

Bart ended our relationship with a shoddy email, void of the romantic twaddle he spouted several months before. Like a jilted teenager, once again I tried to find a small slice of regret in his words, a tiny piece of salvation to clutch on my way down, Alas, Bart left no soft place for my heart to land.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but the only beholder that matters is you.

Being a maverick traveller, one would like to place oneself in the place of a local; just listen without judgement.