Best 1003 quotes in «memoir quotes» category

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 first trip to the mainland came after I had been traveling extensively in Asia on reporting assignments for The Journal of Commerce newspaper, located at that time on Wall Street in New York City.

[My father] was handsome and tanned and smelled wonderful, like a mix of the ocean and fresh-cut grass, except when he smoked his pipe, which also smelled wonderful, as how I thought wisdom must smell, when it curls about your head.

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.

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)

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

My story begins with a question.

My story matters, but it does not define me.

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.

Negative self talk costs more than even the richest person can afford. So be nice to yourself whenever possible … and know that it is always possible.

Never in our silent moments of illusion do we sense the dark parallel that lives next to us. Nor do we suspect the carrier.

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 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.

Never let a man determine the woman you want to be.

No matter what else people may steal from you, they will never be able to take away your knowledge.

Normally, it takes people about 60 to 90 minutes to reach REM sleep, so they wouldn’t enter this stage during a 20 minute nap. People with narcolepsy often enter REM sleep soon after falling asleep. If a person enters REM sleep in two or more of the five naps in eight minutes or less during the study, it’s highly suggestive of narcolepsy.

Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called "Rushdie," and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.

Not everyone is capable of sacrificing his own life. So it is, always has been and always will be.

Nothing about these times makes any sense. Nothing. Putting it to words only makes it sound too simple.

Not agreeing with something that happened in history or with another person’s traditions doesn’t provide license to eradicate or vilify entire aspects of the past.

Nothing changes everything.

Nothing is a turnoff like a New York City housing authority kitchen. People want to hear about that once you're successful, not when you're living in it.

Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn't work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way around. And if you're writing memoir you're bound to discover things about yourself you didn't realize before, may indeed prefer never to have know, but there you are: progress of some sort.

Novins had a great impact on my way of thinking and the journalist I became. Although also a friend of Walter Cronkite, he spoke to us mostly about Murrow. He had high expectations for his students.

Not the first one I loved but the only one that'd keep the fire burning for a long time.

Non siamo nati solo per mangiare, né per guadagnare denaro, né per starcene senza far nulla, né per lasciare eredi, né tantomeno per invecchiare. Non siamo invece venuti al mondo perché dentro di noi brucia la fiamma di una passione? Non siamo qui, adesso, per amare i nostri cari e creare tanti bei ricordi, e portarli con noi fino a quando moriremo, senza rimpianti?

Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the "Wait-a-Minute Moment" - that pivotal instant when girls from traditional cultures start pondering what's in it for them, exactly, to be getting married at the age of thirteen and starting to have babies not long after. They start wondering if they might prefer to make different choices for themselves, or any choices, for that matter. Once girls from closed societies start thinking such thoughts, all hell breaks loose.

Oh dear heart, save yourself. will you not sing yourself to sleep humming wishes you thought you wouldn't make. will you not step into territory you know you should avoid. will you not believe words over actions because you want to trust in pretty little lies.

oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)

Oh my!! How you've grown. Soon you'll be catching the Lord's balls.