Best 1003 quotes in «memoir quotes» category

Truth: last week I online shopped too much. Then I ate 2 pounds of jelly beans to feel better about that. In fact, while I was trying to read soul-nourishing things all I could think about was shopping and jellybeans. Points to the monkey mind.

Two years before our arrival at Maplehurst, we had left the Midwest eager for new jobs, milder weather, and a house of our own with a real backyard. We were unprepared for the enormity of our losses. Good friends. Close-knit community. A meaningful connection with the work of our minds and our hands. There was one lost thing, in particular. It was such a natural part of our prewilderness lives that I only ever recognized it after it was gone. In our northern city, we had lived a seasonal rhythm of summer festivals and winter sledding, spring baseball games and autumn apple picking. Our moments and our months were distinguished by the color of the trees, deep red or spring green, and the color of the lake, sparkling and playful in summer, menacing and dull in winter. These things were the beautiful, sometimes harsh, but always rhythmic backdrop in our days. Time was like music. It had a melody. In the wilderness, the only thing that differentiated one season from the next was my terrible winter asthma. Without time's music, I became aimless and disconnected, like a child's lost balloon.

Understanding the Way of Story as a sacred pattern and a living event. Story can reveal a spiritual path and or the way to healing. Stories become the foundation of health, peacebuilding and vision. Learning to listen, to recognize, to understand and attend the teachings and revelations of the Stories we have been given to live guides us toward the 5th world. Our individual stories, when carefully attended, can reveal each person’s particular path of healing and transformation. Even illness is a story that can lead us to our own and to community healing. Learning to recognize the Story that we or another is living can be a worthy life work.

[V]alue your dreams but . . . be wary of them also, . . . look for integrity in unusual places.

Very slowly, with hands, tongues, mouths, we unwrapped and untied ourselves, laying open gifts. Gave birth to each other again, as separate bodies who enjoy collision.

Vikings, it seems, make their own way.

View other authors as your allies rather than your competition

VOA no longer felt like a sanctuary but rather a mirage and we were desert wanderers.

Walk your own path and be yourself

Wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking.

Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing.

Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing. Drinking was no longer something to take for granted. I’d never needed to consider water before.

We are not defined by what knocks us down - we are defined by how e get back up

We aren’t afraid of what we can explain. But the truth is stranger than an aimless road, it always was. The world was full of blinding mysteries, and I was blind to truth of what they were. There were things about the world I couldn’t understand.

We are living in an artificial world—a world of fantasies and illusions. We've learned beautiful phrases but haven't learned yet how to carry out that little bit that we know. Our brains are stuffed with quotations, while at the same time nine out of ten of these dogmas are incomprehensible, murky, or lies. Which are worthwhile and which are not? Yes, I must stop being false before others and myself. How simple it all seems! But how do I do this? Let just a little time pass, and then we may understand—only the simplest, honorable acts determine the value of a man. Only I myself can and must help myself to become an adult.

We are not defined by what knocks us down - we are defined by how we get back up

We aren’t afraid of what we can explain.

We are paint streaked runners, deafened by the cries of all the sad people. It's a powerful sound that practically yanks the tears right out of you. Sometimes, you just can't help but feel like a very small clam in a very big ocean.

We are spiritual beings having a human experience. We don't choose the experience but we do choose how we react to the experience we have. Choose to be positive, choose to be helpful, choose to be happy.

We had deluded ourselves that perhaps peace might find the Arabs able, unhelped and untaught, to defend themselves with paper tools. Meanwhile we glozed our fraud by conducting their necessary war purely and cheaply. But now this gloss had gone from me. Chargeable against my conceit were the causeless, ineffectual deaths of Hesa. My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.

We don't give up, even when things are bad. We pay our debts. We work hard. We act decently. We help our neighbours if they need it. We do what we say we will do. We don't want much attention. We look after our own. We are proud of what we do. We try to be quietly smart. We take chances sometimes to get on. We will fail sometimes. We will be affected by the wider world... But we hold on to who we are.

We had our family patterns and were quite comfortable in them, which made it even more shocking when, just after his eightieth birthday, Papa began bringing up his time as a prisoner of war in Germany. Of course, I had always known that he had served in World War II and been captured, just like I had always know the stories about my grandmother and the build of their house. It's that peculiar type of family memory, where someone has obviously told you but you were too young to remember actually hearing it, so it seems like knowledge that was instilled at birth. Papa never brought it up, and my parents said they hadn't heard him mention it once in the previous fifty years. But suddenly, he was talking.

We cannot honor those we have lost if we lose our minds. - Charmainism

..."we didn't make it around the world, but we were able to wrap the world around us.

We had never eaten our own chickens but we delighted in eating their eggs. No matter how hot the summer became, they always presented us with eggs, which I thought was very generous of them, considering the heat. I'm sure I wouldn't have bothered.

We human beings are at once delicate and intricate and temporal like the tulips in an April field and sturdy, resilient and enduring as Mt. Rainier when the will inspires us. We are individual miracles, those who live in vegetative states and those who wait with them

Weight gains aren't failures – they're learning curves.

Well, did anything interesting happen today?' [my father] would begin. And even before the daily question was completed I had eagerly launched into my narrative of every play, and almost every pitch, of that afternoon's contest. It never crossed my mind to wonder if, at the close of a day's work, he might find my lengthy account the least bit tedious. For there was mastery as well as pleasure in our nightly ritual. Through my knowledge, I commanded my father's undivided attention, the sign of his love. It would instill in me an early awareness of the power of narrative, which would introduce a lifetime of storytelling, fueled by the naive confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my father did.

We look into our hearts and see objectivity; we look into our minds and see rationality; we look into our beliefs and see reality.

We love our partners for who they are, not for who they are not.

We must plant our dreams in real earth. We must dirty our hands. It's the only way. Whether we dream of planting flower gardens or churches, ever dream needs a place in which to take root and grow. Every dream needs a home.

We must define a story which encourages us to make use of the place where we live without killing it, and we must understand that the living world cannot be replicated.

We're distracted and we let the door slam on the person behind us, we trip over curbs as we're texting, we're...sedentary, weighed down, collapsed over the laptop. ...We've forgotten how to move through life with grace.

We're all the same whoever loves.

We're human. We all occasionally wet ourselves. No one is really better than anyone else. We're just all trying to make it through the year as best we can. We screw up sometimes. We succeed sometimes. We laugh. We cry. We go on. Those are the things we should really share with each other this holiday season, right, if we dare send a letter? We should share the truth. We should share the insanity.

...We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned withpot coffin or ceremony, our hasty untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.

We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin.

We were magical and alive - we cared about music and conversation, sex and spit and blood, holding on tight to the space between youth and adulthood. When I look back at that time, my nostalgia can be blinding. Because we weren’t night dwellers, vampires who would live forever. We were a bunch of kids playing at being Lost Boys, looking for our version of Neverland.

We were not interested in making life better for some some people. We wanted everyone to thrive and accomplish their dreams in Los Angeles: gays, straights, blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, Russians, Armenians, Pacific Islanders, and many others. Even when my detractors couldn't believe that I stood for equality and fairness, I'd always govern with those guiding principles.

We tried to change Vietnam. Instead, Vietnam changed us.

We will remember what it was like to lose you, our pain the black background of our electric blue joy. We will remember that there are few answers to our questions; the questions that seem to float into an endless expanse of sky.

What can we expect from an empty shell Where many hearts of pearl once beat to dwell Waves fail to break hard layer's bond of love Wailing shore sends memoir to the sky above

What are the memory triggers that bend our hearts? What are the ones that break them?

What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think—the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn’t known. Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie’s rim as you climbed its cliffs. And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another. Knowledge wasn’t a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being—whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars.

What crannies of untouched perception can you explore? What autumn was it that moon entered your life? When was it that you picked blueberries at their quintessential moment? How long did you wait for your first true bike? Who were your angels? What are you thinking of? Not thinking of? Writing can give you confidence, can train you to wake up.

What made them particularly unusual was the way Steve presented them. He was rational and fluent and had given much thought to the problems he was discussing, although he had not thought about the implications of the thing – that this was socially deviant conduct of the highest order, involving injuries and maiming and the destruction of property., I don’t think he understood the implications; I don’t think he would have acknowledged them as valid.

What happens to a mother in that second when she places her baby in the arms of someone else and turns away? And the lie? Who do you become the moment the deceit is formed on your tongue? When you first speak the words that your baby has died? Is there a diary entry buried somewhere in a loft full of cobwebs and regret that reveals even the slightest fragment of heartbreak?

What if your Vision Board came true?

What is this food in my head, anyway? Let’s see...it’s green and good for you and so delicious. It’s prepared by angels with love. The minute you bite into it, it’s savory, chewy, nourishing, and whole- some. You feel instantly revitalized. A small, tiny amount, just a few bites, rejuvenates every cell, deepens your breath, clears your mind, heals your wounds, and mends your heart. It’s made from joyous plants that voluntarily separate themselves from their stalks, laying themselves at the feet of the approaching gardener who gathers them. They eagerly offer their vital energies to nourish living spirits. The angels in their chef hats, singing mantras, cook it tenderly to retain all the benefits of the generous plants. It’s barely sweet, barely salty, and contains all the freshness of spring herbs, summer fruit, spreading leaves, and burgeoning seeds. It comes premade in bags or boxes...you just open it up, sit down, and enjoy. It’s a full meal, enough maybe for a whole day, maybe for a week, maybe for your family, maybe for your friends and neighbors. It multiplies like loaves and fishes, in little biodegradable containers that vaporize instantly the moment you finish them, without any greenhouse emissions. Nothing to clean up!

What's the slope of the line?' My father asked. I looked at him in silence. 'It's positive,' he said with forced optimism. 'And what does that mean?' Another blank look. 'It means we make progress every day.