Best 1003 quotes in «memoir quotes» category

If a memoir needs a reason, mine is simply that wonderful things become even more wonderful for me if I can share them and dreadful things more bearable.

If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line.

I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves.

I felt unready to hold myself responsible for the decision if I slept with him

If everyone else in the room is working on their next pitch, then fixating on the previous one puts you a step behind. This approach also applies to an overall career where it's better to focus on the next opportunity rather than ruminate on the missed chances and setbacks.

I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I’d lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and writing—even writing badly—had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay this awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.

I felt ridiculously self-conscious, like the stick of celery at a luxurious buffet.

I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin

If I can do it, anybody can do it. Willpower is strong! I believe that. You just have to have faith in yourself—and God—and make sure you know where your priorities stand.

If I have been given any gift in this life, it’s my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination.

If I make a mistake, she raps me over the fingers with her ruler. But she never hurts my spirit, she only hits me to correct my mistake.

I find it strange when people ask where ideas come from. As if Stephen King is going to point to a well in the ground and say, 'There. All my ideas come from there.

If life deals you a lousy hand .... BLUFF!

I found LOVE. But not just any kind of love. During one of my daily meditations, when tears were flowing down my cheeks as if I had been watching a horror movie, with all my pain, suffering and demons, playing main characters in the story of my life, I had felt an inexplicable warmth in my heart. I felt something that I had never felt before. An unconditional love… for myself. I felt that I was more than just a human being. I felt I was part of the surrounding universe. I was a spirit. And in that moment, I felt as if nothing else had existed or mattered. No worries. No problems. There was no past. There was no future. There was only ME and there was no… suffering any more. No more pain, no more heartbreak. I didn’t need anyone else to love me because I BECAME love. I became who I had always been so desperately searching for, whole as a person. I realised that only when we are whole as a spirit, filled with unconditional love for ourselves, that can we truly find and share an immense love with another human being, the one that is right for us and who is also whole as a person. – from ‘Polish Girl In Pursuit of the English Dream by Monika Wiśniewska

...if that energy could have been channelled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.

if the rain you left behind for me to deal with taught me anything in this life, it would be that after every shower there would be rays of sun so I will believe the sky when it cries that all will be okay eventually.

If we are lucky enough, as I am, to be from time to time in quite close contact with young people, they can sometimes make it easier to hang on to this notion when they function, as every person does vis-a-vis every other person they come up against, as a mirror. Always we are being reflected in the eyes of others. Are we silly or sensible, stupid or clever, bad or good, unattractive or sexy...? We never stop being at least slightly aware of, if not actively searching for, answers to such questions, and are either deflated or elated, in extreme cases ruined or saved, by what we get. So if when you are old a beloved child happens to look at you as if he or she thinks (even if mistakenly!) that you are wise and kind: what a blessing! It's not that such a fleeting glimpse of yourself can convert you into wiseness and kindness in any enduring way; more like a good session of reflexology which, although it can cure nothing, does make you feel like a better person while it's going on and for an hour or two afterwards, and even that is well worth having. The more frequent such shots of self-esteem are, the more valuable they become, so there is a risk - remote, but possible - of their becoming addictive. An old person who doesn't enjoy having young people in her life must be a curmudgeon, but it is extremely important that she should remember that risk and watch her step. Or he, his.

I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn't find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible.

If you are listening to the roar, you're going to miss the whisper.

I guess this means we're uck-fayed, don't it Mikee?

I had lots of appointments, many places to go, and I needed a lot of rest; the art of constructively selling oneself requires much tender self-care

I had never read a book written by an African-American. I didn't know that black people could write books. I didn't know that blacks had done any great things. I was always conscious of my inferiority and I always remembered my place - until the Civil Rights Movement came to the town where I was born and grew up.

I had stripped naked in front of men. Drunk. In morning’s somber brightness I tried to remember why I had done it. Total exposure had seemed like the only way to be seen more clearly, heard, but now it seemed the opposite: a wild act that would define me.

I had signed up for a lot of courses, but the biggest teacher is life. Perhaps we need to die multiple times in order to realize the true meaning of life. I’m grateful I died that day.

I have become conscious of my own “cry face.” My face puckers like the business end of a hot dog except for my mouth, which stretches in a grimace so wide as to accommodate said hotdog horizontally within it. It’s not pretty.

If you are a twin, you watch yourself live two lives–yours and hers. It’s constant comparison. I am never as good as the bad I wanted her to be. I was the only soldier I needed. We couldn’t haven known what splitting would mean. Time speeds past fast, scattering like shrapnel, and is quiet as cobwebs. We wait for the ambush. Sister will find out first; she’ll be my living memory. She will be the body left standing.

If you can see it, you can achieve it. God helps those who helps themselves. Power is in the act of humility.

If you had met my father you would never, not for an instant, have thought he was an assassin.

I had feared this end, wondered where I would go from it, from the moment I first stepped on this footpath in the desert. But I found I was not afraid of reaching it now. I was happy. I hadn't found every answer for where I was going, but I now had all I needed to take these next steps. I knew I would do what I needed to become a writer now.

I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.

I had enough of a story churning in my head that combined all the elements of the day—the interview, the concert, the after-party’s private session—when he put his guitar away and asked me if I had ever experimented with homosexuality. Talk about unexpected segues. Letting him know that I had not and wasn’t about to, I successfully changed the subject by asking him to give me a condensed account about traveling to Mississippi in search of Bukka White.

I had received a t-shirt from my best friend Veronica at my police academy graduation. It reads, ‘Throw your donut in the opposite direction and the cops won’t get you.’ I love wearing that t-shirt.

I have an increasingly powerful need for books, which throw a glimmer of light into my darkness.

I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. Evenings, I light the old lamps. There is no running water, and I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!

I have never experienced writers block and I've written every day since June 1972. But I have experienced the need to get up and walk around, eat ice cream, let ideas percolate, forget the story for a time, and then return to the page. Even the muse needs a vacation to rest up before she gives more of herself.

I have referred to it as a gift--something for which others with this affliction have taken me to task. I was only speaking from my own experience, of course, but I stand partially corrected: if it is a gift, it's the gift that just keeps on taking. Coping with relentless assault and the accumulating damage is not easy. Nobody would ever choose to have this visited upon them. Still, this unexpected crisis forced a fundamental life decision: adopt a siege mentality--or embark upon a journey. Whatever it was--courage? acceptance? wisdom?--that finally allowed me to go down the second road (after spending a few disastrous years on the first) was unquestionably a gift--and absent this neurophysiological catastrophe, I would never have opened it, or been so profoundly enriched. That's why I consider myself a lucky man.

I have tried to fight the impulse, the attraction, but my defenses crumble every time I see him. Since my divorce from Hank I'm practically love-starved.

I hoped my solitude would help me reclaim my innocence, remember who I’d been, to find who I wanted to be. To become her. To love her, Deborah, Debby, Doll Girl, Wild Child, me, despite the irreversible truth that I’d been raped. I was learning again that I could trust myself and, also, I was seeing, other people. I was brave enough now to go out alone towards what I wanted, to trust that I was strong enough for it, to know that help would come when I needed it. It always came.

I just want to see places – something inside me just makes me keep moving.

I Have Fought the Good Fight and Won

I have learned that I am a better everything because I wanted and loved those babies so much. I am also a better everything because I lost them. Sure, the losses left my heart and soul shattered at first, but now with daily work in recovery I have a scarred but healing heart and soul

I haven't waited to be summoned for my big moment by a tap on the shoulder from a mysterious, benevolent stranger. It doesn't work that way where I'm from. You make your own opportunities where I'm from.

I have this beast. He comes and goes at will. Silence. He's very powerful. Silence. He has control over me. Silence. I want to come and go at will. Silence. I want to be the powerful one.

I held the cardboard and felt its scissor-cut edge. And for the first time I understood the shape of my grief. I could feel exactly how big it was. It was the strangest feeling, like holding something the size of a mountain in my arms. You have to be patient, he had said. If you want to see something very much, you just have to be patient and wait. There was no patience in my waiting, but time had passed all the same, and worked its careful magic. And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love.

I hope to offer the personal as a way to connect to the universal, not a claim for one universal experience of having breasts, but a universal hope for kindness—to each other and our selves and our bodies.

I journeyed alone for almost ten years before I found home. Adoptions are like very delicate gardening with transplants and grafts. Mine took hold, rooted, and bloomed, even though there were inevitable adjustments to the new soil and climate. Yet I have not forgotten where my roots started.

I knew that I was the least-loved child because I was a girl and because my mother had died giving birth to me.

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. ...We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.

I know of other mothers who have children with disabilities,and right away they loved them and decided to fight for them. That isn’t my story.

I learnt a lot from the simple lives our friends lived. I saw them living with so much less than we, as westerners, were used to. I couldn't even begin to imagine how to prepare a meal for four people using a bucket, one saucepan and a wok. More than likely, I would have been outraged if asked to do so. I can hear myself saying words to the effect of, ‘Bugger off! Let’s just get take out.’ Anyone who knew me would have known better than to ask.