Best 1003 quotes in «memoir quotes» category

The Air Force was confused about what it wanted me to be when I grew up. I applied for an ROTC scholarship out of high school because I wanted to be an astronaut. None of my teachers had ever broken the news to me that I couldn’t fly into space, so the third-grade dream remained.

The Americans were understandably on hair triggers. There was a good reason for all of this security. For despite TV images of quick victory, much of Baghdad certainly had not fallen and firefights with die-hard Ba’athists loyal to Saddam Hussein were raging all over the city.

The bassist -- always the bassist.

The biggest roadblock is one's self.

The Brit's face shares a heritage with a junkyard butt-sniffing mutt. It's a hard-earned moonshine mug, dotted with a hairy mole that looks like a rat's been gnawing on it. His beard looks like a white sneeze. The teeth are jagged and out of alignment, having opened quarts at Jiffy Quick Lube for half a decade.

The bravest thing I ever did was leave there. The next bravest thing I did was come back, to make myself heard.

The Buddha taught that most problems - if only you give them enough time and space - will eventually wear themselves out.

The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed from the cheap materials of convention and fear, had been buckling for years.

The children we bring into the world are small replicas of ourselves and our husbands; the pride and joy of grandfathers and grandmothers. We dream of being mothers, and for most of us that dreams are realised naturally. For this is the Miracle of Life.

...the clear water the color of deeply steeped tea, surrounded by cattails and gracile grasses.

The clown was an evil one. They’re either good or bad, and this one was definitely the latter.

The complete Apollo team...directly involves slightly over 400,000 people...Included are some if the country's foremost scientists and engineers. This mobilization of men and resources is unprecedented in history since WWII

The downside is the fear.The fear of something happening to her, the pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean.I hope you do for your sake.

The entire time, he’d only ever looked at my body, never at my face, his empty eyes hungry, never seeing me at all. I wasn’t the presence of a person, but a body. I could have said anything, he wouldn’t have heard me. He’d never responded, not by stopping, not with his words.

The fire roared louder, greedy, completely engulfing the walls, the floors, the ceilings, stretching its arms to the sky as if in supplication to its gods. Within minutes, the inferno devoured itself, leaving no trace it had existed, it had breathed, it had danced with the devil.

The entire partying lifestyle was superficial in my experience, and most of my friendships were as deep as a shot glass and as short-lived as a pack of cigarettes.

The features of character are carved out of adversity.

The first night in the hospital with a snuffling baby girl, I learned that my family was not the only thing that had expanded. There was now a whole new world of opportunities for judgment and self-doubt.

The freedom of the open road is seductive, serendipitous and absolutely liberating.

The God I serve is able to save us both. To give us the winning lottery ticket so all our money problems will go away. To mend our broken hearts. To bring us close to those we love. He is able. He is able. He is able. But even if He doesn’t, do not bow to bitterness. Do not fall down onto your broken pieces and let them cut you to ribbons. Even if He doesn’t do all that He is able to do, all that we wish He would do, He is good.

The funny thing about money is that you can't take it with you, so don’t try to.

The hefty gang adored Big Nana: She was expressive and affectionate and bold, blustery and showy around them, applauding their girths and glutinous ways at the table. She pinched their cheeks and butts, other fleshy body parts, squeezed them to the edge of respiratory failure, kidded them about the pudgy Sicilian girls, and gave them hell for not fattening me up. They were well aware of what she did to Scarface.

The greatest challenge of my life has been to see and accept the actual truth without great pain and struggle against it.

The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead.

The high road of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.

The griefs that have been hardest for me were the ones I didn’t recognize as griefs, because they came in what were supposed to be the best times of my life. No one whispered in my ear that the best times, the ones that change our lives, are woven with the thread of loss.

The harsh dimness that follows loss isn’t static, but charged with the energy of immanent change. Hurt, I was left with a choice: wallow and stay in the dark, or seek light and fight to reach it. These two paths emerged. I had this choice to make. Loss is the shocking catalyst of transformation. I saw that this mountain valley, haunted by senseless murders, darker, had absorbed unthinkable violence and turned it into mesmerizing light. My rape became my catalyst. Rape gave me cause to flee the muteness – forced me into making a bold and forceful change. I chose to fight to find a way to leave to seek my own strength and beauty. I was searching to find the way to make light.

The highway of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.

The idea of practicing love is deeply appealing to me, because built right in is an acceptance of imperfection. There is an acknowledgment to myself that I am going to mess this up, an understanding that there is room to grow. Each of my failures just affirms the truth that we are all starting over and rising again.

The last time I’d spoken French I was twelve years old; before I reached my thirteenth birthday the teacher had correctly steered me into woodwork classes.

The interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid story; it even begins to hear rumors, from beyond the horizon skin’s rim, of nations and wars. You wake one day and discover your grandmother; you wake another day and notice, like any curious naturalist, the boys.

...the job of the spiritual memoirist is to read the world like a book. Medieval monks believed the natural world was a scriptural text, liber mundi, requiring as much study and devotion as the Bible. This impulse is literary as well: Writers are constantly alert to the environment, seeking out its inherent metaphoric resonance.

The landscape is bathed in the honeyed light of morning. Sometimes the memory of winter comes again. And my days are colored reveries of you, my nights sensuous

Their promise, my children's possibilities, still linger in our home.

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.

The lawyer asked us to sit down. He was holding a copy of the will in his hands. I sat nearest him. He flipped several pages over and then handed me the copy, with only the last page showing. There at the top of the final page of the will was one short paragraph which read: “It is my intention to make no provision herein for my son Christopher or my daughter Christina for reasons which are well known to them.

The Lush hadn’t driven in almost a decade - ever since she got in an accident that shook her so badly she refused to get behind the wheel. As you can imagine, someone nicknamed The Lush wouldn’t make a good DD anyway. I’d known her about a year before ever seeing her sober.

The memoirs of call girls are much in demand these days - a millennial craze.

...The more I learned the more I realized how very much one has to know before one is in-the-know at all.

The morning after Jim’s death, as I dried off after my shower, I wondered to what extent, if at all, Jim was…around. Could he be with us, unseen or unsensed by us, but able to observe? Most importantly at this moment, could he possibly see me naked?

The more faithful I was to Him, the more faithful He was to me.

The move away from writing poetry was gradual. It was a gentle slope into a muddy pond; it was a collection of choices. There was no one thing that took the pen from my hand. Life got in the way. Poetry was an elective. I elected to let it slip into the water. I elected to let my inner poet slide into that deep water and float there a long time, until at last I could no longer see her there drowning." -Nearly Orthodox

The morning opens, a mist of innocence appears across the countryside that tells each one of us the day is new. That feeling of hope, love and the humble awareness of our duty becomes clear if even for a moment. It is that experience of inspiration that follows us into a small town woken by a cool frost on this Sunday morning and the laughter of children playing.

The Nazis not only had subtle ways of destroying human life and dignity, they were equally good at desecrating the graves of the dead ― something that is held sacred and ring-fenced with care within the culture of every single tribe and nation in the world.

The nearest one came to a tumble dryer was if the laundry basket was dropped on the way to the washing-line and then the whole lot went tumbling down the drive.

The next day I received a phone call from Mr. Pride which began, “So, I heard you won Ho of the Year.” Well when you put it like that it didn’t sound like such an accomplishment.

The night Junior stayed, my right to myself was taken from me in a way that had felt more final than ever before. Then the school had denied my rape—my word. The subsequent silencing and exile—misplaced shame—were the catalysts for me to finally break free of my mother's grasp and my voicelessness and do what I truly wanted, alone. I wished to prove myself as independent and valid and strong—to my mother, and to the world. I'd believed I had needed something huge and external that no one could deny was impressive, so I could show my family I was able—so they could finally know that I was strong. Instead I had shown myself. And it felt wonderful.

Then, I continue my journey where the wind takes the tears, and the miles soften the memories.

The only thing to do with tears is water your flowers with them, so that there is something to show the world when the sun comes out.

The only real certainty is that if you get to live, you gotta die. Live life now.