Best 1003 quotes in «memoir quotes» category

Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.

Live life carefully but save time for fun.

Living as Wild Child, I could no longer be Debby Parker comfortably — this name that I’d been given at birth that defined me before I’d had the chance to define myself.

Look at what I wrote at the beginning of this memoir. Have I caught anything at all of the extraordinary night when Paul Dempster was born? I am pretty sure that my little sketch of Percy Boyd Staunton is accurate, but what about myself? I have always sneered at autobiographies and memoirs in which the writer appears at the beginning as a charming, knowing little fellow, possessed of insights and perceptions beyond his years, yet offering these with false naivete to the reader, as though to say, 'What a little wonder I was, but All Boy.' Have the writers any notion or true collection of what a boy is? I have and I have reinforced it by forty-five years of teaching boys. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man. Oh these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots' oaths! Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man's idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try. And to begin I must give you some notion of the village in which Percy Boyd Staunton and Paul Dempster and I were born.

Looking back on the eruption, asking God why I had somehow been chosen to be afflicted with this damn disease, the fairer question would have been, “Why not me?” Why should I have been exempted from holding the proverbial short straw?

Love has no demand of us but to keep practicing, to do the next hard thing. Love says, Come dear. Take the next step.

Love is bigger than everything.

Love lights our darkness. It is forever tries.

Love was a verb with a certain amount of energy attached to it - a daily quota - and you had to choose on whom you wanted to spend this energy. That was love. That was why people had to pray for it. If it were not finite, no one would pine for love in their lives - they would just wait to receive or learn to give.

Love was like notches on a speaker that could be cranked up and down, the decibels of desire, the frequencies of feeling. Sometimes she thought that she might have cranked it all the way up and broken the dial before the music had even started.

Maggie, tou made it possible -but not probably for me to be the man I am now.

Make no mistake about it – forgiveness and happiness are inseparable.

Make time your friend and not your enemy

Many of the people I write about were deliberately left out of the history books that we were forced to read in school. For me, that history was "written wrong" and needed to be corrected. My intention was to make them visible so they could be role models for others. To show how each, in his or her own way, dribbled gracefully around that obstacle in the narrow corridor.

Mary the Canary lives in a cloud of perfume and colours. She's an auxiliary nurse by day and a country and western singer by night: bed pans and power ballass. She's so glamorous she makes Mrs Hart look plain. She is the other woman and I'm bring trained to hate her even though I've never met her.

Many have come to understand that while reality and truth are not always the same, they do not necessarily oppose or preclude one another. The myths of Shiva, the lake and the mountain, Buddhist stories and visualisations, the feeling of a mountain rising: none of these need be literal in order to be considered truthful. Such moments simply point to a truth as complex as the people who seek to understand them.

Martin was very pro-American in his attitude and statements. When I knew him, he was divorced, alone and a Korean who had never lived in Korea—neither in what became North or South Korea. A man without a country.

Mary [Tyler Moore] was absolutely brilliant... She is a fabulous actress. She can do anything.

mates, to my sisters and me, are seen mainly as shadows of the people they're involved with. they move. They're visible in direct sunlight. But because they don't have access to our emotional buttons-- because they can't make us twelve again, or five, and screaming-- they don't really count as players.

Mauve cream Kabuki actors use conceal dark circles under my eyes. I brush soothing sable bristles of coral blush across high cheekbones, smudge taupe color on eye lids, darken thick lashes, dot ash rose gloss across my lips. Heavy red frame glasses and rose lenses cover grey eyes. I rip the telephone from the wall and stumble, drunk and crying, to the door, batter the facing with the phone handle, counting arrhythmic phlegmatic beats. Splinters and fragments of wood fall to the floor, a lingering catarrh lying among pale turquoise and gold threads. The scent of roses and jasmine lingers. The sky and dot and window refracture. I look into the gold leaf mirror, pleased with the effect: A perfect face reflects no inner turmoil.

Maybe I'd die. Maybe I'd burn to ash in wind, or blacken like the pines. Charred skeletons, I'd add one to the count. I didn't feel scared. I didn't think to panic. The trail wasn't burning. I was raw, ripe for loving. I wasn't stopping.

Maybe being broken helps you become a better person.

May I see the beauty in others without denigrating my own.

Maybe some people are only ever meant to be missed.

Meditation and mindfulness are tools for working with the mind, but where they have led me is to a blossoming of the heart...

Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life.

Meandering cows, tenacious bicyclers, belching taxis, rickshaws, fearless pedestrians and the occasional mobile ‘cigarette and sweets’ stand all fought our taxi for room on the narrow two-lane road turned local byway.

[Memory]... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as having happened together. The actual year or season or time of day shifts to a different one. Many details are lost, usually in ways that serve the self in its present situation, not the self of ten or twenty or forty years ago when the remembered event took place. And even the fresh memory, the 'original,' is not reliable in a documentary sense....Memory, in short, is not a record of the past but an evolving myth of understanding the psyche spins from its engagement with the world.

Memories of beloved places - not necessarily places we lived in for a long time but places we were attached to - are the ones we remember in most vivid detail.

Membaca autobiografi atau memoir seolah-olah terlibat dalam dialog dengan narator yang menjadi jurucakap pengarang: mendengar secara langsung cerita serta pendapat tentang zamannya dengan gaya pengucapan peribadinya. Gaya bahasa dan idiosinkrasi penampilannya menghantar karyanya mirip cereka, tetapi fakta dan kebenaran subjeknya akan menyeretnya menjadi mirip sejarah, dan hakikat inilah yang berkemungkinan melahirkan memoir sebagai wacana intelektual yang artistik; menggugah dan tidak menjemukan.

Memory was my drug of choice. -Pea Hicks

Men ought to be a four-letter word! Menn!

Mentre tornavo a casa a piedi col pesante manoscritto, ripensai a quella volta che il professor Kerry aveva cominciato una lezione scrivendo alla lavagna: "Chi scrive la storia?". Lì per lì mi era sembrata una domanda strana. L'idea che avevo degli storici non era umana: erano personaggi simili a mio padre, più profeti che uomini, le cui concezioni sul passato così come sul futuro non potevano essere messe in discussione né tantomeno ampliate. Adesso, mentre attraversavo il King's College all'ombra dell'enorme cappella, la mia vecchia diffidenza mi sembrò quasi buffa. Chi scrive la storia? Pensai. La scrivo io.

Mistakes? That's why they put erasers on pencils.

Mine is a gruesome job, but for a scientist with a love for the mechanics of the human body, a great one.

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.

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)

Much older than myself, Martin was a distinguished and handsome career journalist who worked at the same newspaper I did.

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.

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.)

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.

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 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'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 handbag turned into a diaper bag for the chronically ill.