Best 1003 quotes in «memoir quotes» category

Humor writers: 1) Write 2) Laugh 3) Laugh when they write 4) Write when they laugh

I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and cleanly delineated from our realities as possible, and that sometimes it can take years of effort to reach such a point of sober discernment.

I always felt awkward and unfinished, unworthy of love, suspicious of affection offered. My mother's absence became a great presence in my life.

...I am about eight years old when I first become aware of being other--foreign, outside, separate. Because this lesson comes from my own family, it resonates deeper and truer than playground taunts ever have.

I am a product of two worlds and each world has given me a reason to love, be kind and grow strong.

I am in the unthinkable situation that people cannot bear to contemplate.

I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

I am not enough in myself; I can barely make it through buying milk and school supplies. Thank goodness there is a Guardian to come before me and throw off the dark.

I am not your dog that you whistle for; I’m not a stray animal you call over, and I am not, I never have been, nor will I ever be, your “baby”!

I am not here to make you feel better, I am just here to make you feel worse

I am not who I was. I am not even who I was yesterday. Tomorrow I will be new again, and again, until I am completely the woman I was meant to be.

I am still not good enough. I am still not whole enough. I am still not pure enough. I am still weakness and sharp edges and broken, but He is good and pure and whole, all that I strive for but am not. I wake up every morning and I sit in silence and I choose to believe. I may speak. I may not. I let Him wrap up all my broken in to His grace. He takes me imperfect. This is the great mystery I never knew.

I associate so many fond memories with food. On that damp evening, along in a tiny restaurant smelling of mildew and lobster, I was 1,600 miles from everyone I knew and loved. After one bite of the pie, I closed my eyes, and taste transported me back to the warm, familiar comfort of my grandmother's kitchen. She always had a pie sitting on the kitchen counter, ready to serve, and a fresh pot of coffee brewing.

I avoided one-on-one situations, eye contact, and healthy relationships. Instead I took refuge in drinking too much, cheap sex, and sarcasm.

I applied at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard after my band broke up. I really wanted to work there because it involved the love of my life, music. It was also located on the world famous Sunset Strip, a place I dreamed of going to ever since I was a teenager in the 80's to become a rock star.

I believe in a God who not only intervenes in human affairs--again and again--but one who also makes banquets out of stale bread.

I began to lust after our conjoining life.

I believe in beauty. I believe in goodness. I believe in the power of turning: the other cheek, time, curve of the earth.

I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.

I carried with me into the West End Bar, the White Horse Tavern, a long list of things I would never do: I would never have my hair set in a beauty parlor. I would never move to a suburb and bake cakes or make casseroles. I would never go to a country club dance, although I did like the paper lanterns casting rainbow colors on the terrace. I would never invest in the stock market. I would never play canasta. I would never wear pearls. I would love like a nursling but I would never go near a man who had a portfolio or a set of golf clubs or a business or even a business suit. I would only love a wild thing. I didn't care if wild things tended to break hearts. I didn't care if they substituted scotch for breakfast cereal. I understood that wild things wrote suicide notes to the gods and were apt to show up three hours later than promised. I understood that art was long and life was short.

I can't say for sure if I'm better off, since I have no way of knowing what would have been. I could have traveled to exotic places and kissed exotic men in the moonlight. Or I could have ended living alone in a dumpy apartment with the flesh eating virus I contracted from a public toilet. Could haves are always a great unknown.

I cherish this book review from the former Executive Director of Contemplative Outreach: A beautiful book. This elegant and authentic memoir of a faith-filled woman shows how it is possible to be very successful and yet vulnerable enough to completely depend on the indwelling Spirit. -Gail Fitzpatrick-Hopler

I come from a small town in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania.

I considered not getting up, but recognized the pain of staying down was worse than the pain of attempting to stand.

I could not feel, smell, see, hear, or taste the world around me. If I had allowed myself to experience these things in all their intensity, I might have lost my mind. If I had allowed myself to cry, I might never have been able to stop. So I survived, but I never felt joy, never felt safe.

I couldn't tear my eyes away from the blood. As odd as it sounds, I felt irritated. I'd just cleaned that glass when I first came in on my shift today. Knowing Jim, he'd make me clean them again before I could go home. After he chewed me out, of course.

I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)

I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul.

I couldn’t yet piece together the disconnected clues to understand the origin of these lights. To explain away strange magic, I’d convinced myself there was an unseen road cutting across the boundless desert floor like a scar. I imagined its different possible courses. The mystery intrigued me. I couldn’t think of the real destination this road would have been built to lead to, but I accepted I couldn’t see, and I accepted it was there, strange but – from where I stood – a beautiful vision.

I’d believed I needed to be steady in myself before I could function with others—but surviving alone no longer felt like a good way either.

I’d begun at the soundless place where California touches Mexico with five Gatorade bottles full of water and eleven pounds of gear and lots of candy. My backpack was tiny, no bigger than a schoolgirl’s knapsack. Everything I carried was everything I had.

I’d become hooked on journalism at once in college when I took my first news writing class at age 19.

I define success as being the best, authentic me that I can be.

I didn’t know if I was brave or reckless.

I didn't know then what words and stories would mean to me. I had no idea they would grow long alien arms and wrap around me and show me the sky and the galaxy and beyond. Books would change my stripes and make me cry and sink into my skull. Books excited me.

...I didn't want to be a passenger on someone else's motorcycle. I wanted to be the one riding that motherfucker.

I didn’t exactly raise my hand and shout “I want to work for the devil!” but I ended up doing his bidding anyway. Ironically, more than a few people told me I was doing the Lord’s work. I knew better than that. I wasn’t saving anyone’s soul or leading them to Jesus. But, I did believe I was saving the country.

I didn’t make choices based on what I liked or didn’t like. I simply accepted what they chose for me. My role had always been to react and adapt to what was decided by other people, by outside circumstances, or in my mind, by God. My voice went unheard in my own life.

I do not NEED a man. That was an impossible thought when I married John thirty years ago. It was unimaginable even seven years ago. I finally understand why lasting love has eluded me: the relationship I've been searching for all along was with myself.

I didn’t know what I would do. There was no way I could survive. I stared at my damp tent ceiling, feeling the frigid air against me, the frozen ground against my bottom, so cold my bare skin burned. I needed to get to the next trail-town, Mammoth Lakes. There was no one here to save me now.

I don't believe in the wisdom of children, nor in the wisdom of the old. There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is word down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.

I didn’t punish myself because I wanted to. I punished myself because I thought it was normal to live for others.

I don’t write to tell stories, I write to find out what the stories want to tell me.

I don’t remember having one conversation with my dad in the three days I was home, but looking back at my journal, I see I wrote about him. I scrawled about how I heard him telling my mom that I needed to go back. I was unhappy; he thought the hiking was better for me. I wonder why he told these things to my mother, nothing to me. I wonder if overhearing his approval encouraged me to finally fly back to the trail. Maybe. Maybe my father’s faith in my walk—in me—made me feel strong enough to leave. His actual words, as I wrote them in my notebook, were, “She’s an adult now, she can do what she wants. It doesn’t mean she’s not selfish.” He almost understood.

I don't understand this--when people love you so much they are willing to get rid of you. I think if I loved someone that much I'd want to stay with them. It doesn't make sense that love would make a mother leave, and I wonder when this mother will love me that much too. I get the idea that love might be something to both desire and fear, and maybe if we don't love each other too much I won't have to go away again. I wonder why love works for everyone else, but it doesn't work for me.

I dozed, jolting occasionally at the driver's loud pronouncement of upcoming stops. At this early hour the bus hummed along quietly with few passengers, so the stops were infrequent. In the hazy surrealism of predawn, there really was not much to see--what I could make out was mainly countryside, though not what I would call quaint, and certainly no Shakespearean cottages or fairy folk peeping from the trees.

I encourage anyone who has gone through hardships to look back through their life’s chapters and see what can be turned into a book. For you never know what heartache God, one day, can turn into a redemptive story.

I don't need to write a memoir of my life. All you need to do is read one of my books. I'm there.

I don't really believe in faeries. But I really want to. Not just for me, but for all of us. Because we are battered by adulthood- by taxes, by loss, by laundry. by nine to five, by deceit and distrust, by the crushing desire to be thin, successful, popular, happy, in love. All the while we are walking on a planet that is disintigrating around us.

I doubted I could survive in the woods without these very basic things to help me. It seemed like a tremendous leap of faith to forsake the tools I’d always been told I needed. And yet leaving college to walk was such a massive leap of faith already, and nothing I’d ever trusted and believed in seemed true any longer.