Best 1003 quotes in «memoir quotes» category

I know that I'm crazy. And that has made all the difference." From: Furiously Happy: A funny book about horrible things.

I know what it's like to sleep in fear, to starve myself to be worthy, to be ashamed of my voice, to want to sleep forever. To question why I deserve to live.

I learned to keep my eyes open and my mouth shut.

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.

I learned in therapy the word "No" is a complete sentence.

I learned that being a mother takes a lot of energy.

I like how writing can take you off for a jaunt in your head and then set you back down in the chair where you've been all along.

I live in one of the best places, bar none, to appreciate the wild natural environment. I also live in one of the most politically difficult places to work on its behalf: Alaska.

I'll enjoy today while it's here, using the time wisely. Each day is a gift that soon becomes a memory.

I looked up "skin" in the encyclopedia and confirmed that, sure enough, it is the human body's largest organ, a fact that suggests our surfaces are critical to who we are, not just the gateway to physical or spiritual depths but a profoundly important web of cells that, in protecting us, gives us form and function.

I looked out again at the rising moon and I let the weight of my day, my week, lift away with the rushing wind as I was blown into the depths of myself.

I love that there's no cutoff where we get labeled and sent off to a home for hopeless, cranky, depressives. Every day is a new chance to listen longer and be braver and love more. We get to try again and again and again.

I made a conscious effort to name my needs and desires. To carefully listen to and accurately identify what I felt. Hunger, exhaustion, cold, lower-back ache, thirst. The ephemeral pangs: wistfulness and loneliness. Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.

I’m chasing after that Holy Shit effect. If this sounds arrogant, that’s because it is. If you don’t believe in your own greatness, no one else will. You’re limited only by your doubts, your fears, and your desire to fit in rather than stand out. And there’s room in this world for all of us to stand out.

I’m excited to announce that Book 2 of our series, My Job: More People at Work Around the World, is in production. Having met hundreds of people in fascinating jobs, I faced an enormous challenge in selecting the stories to include in Book 2 . . . but I believe this collection will surprise and delight you. It covers a range of jobs in the following sections: Health and Recovery Education and Finance Agribusiness and Food Processing Arts and Culture Activism and Diplomacy The book allows you to experience what it’s like to be an addiction-recovery counselor trained as a clown in London, an art teacher working with gang members in Chicago, a midwife working in rural villages in Guatemala, or a mobile-banking agent making her first million in Zambia. Book 2 will take you places you’ve never been, from the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia to a serene beach in Tel Aviv, Israel, and take you deep into the true stories of what it’s like to work at jobs as disparate as teaching a grieving widow to dance, to negotiating with a terrorist. The book will publish in March and is available for preorder at Amazon.

I'm just scared I won't run as fast as I did my freshman year,' I admitted, choking back tears. Coach Woj looked at me for a moment, his eye gentle. 'You don't have to.

I mistakenly believed that I was my emotions.

I’m no expert, no natural-born talent, definitely no guru. As you’ll soon learn, only through a colossal experiment in trial and error did I reach the sexual summit. Although I own up to having worn a cape in a few intimate scenarios, I don’t possess supernatural powers of any kind. Perhaps my IQ is slightly above average, but Mensa isn’t busting down my door. If pressed to define myself, I’d say I’m Horatio Alger between the sheets: a self-made swinging single male. . . with a hefty dose of Buster Keaton mixed in.

I’m pretty sure Number 1 wasn’t even aware that he was using a man’s deadliest weapon against women. He exposed his vulnerability. Over the years, I would repeat a pattern of chronically caving to that same behavior. It didn’t matter whether or not I liked or respected him. Every time he dared to let his guard down and unveil some of his ugliest, grittiest faces, I whole-heartedly believed I was the only person on earth being let in on a secret. It was a mirage of a connection. Despite his faults and my prior resistance, I felt an obligation to uphold that bond. No matter what kind of person he was or how toxic he could have been, I saw beauty in that fleeting defenselessness as if he were an infant, innocent and untainted by the evils of the world. I always fell in love with that face in every man. I clutched that memory tightly, despite the fact that its weight wore my arms and drug my pace. I was so focused on remembering their moment of weakness that I was blind to who they normally were.

I'm ready for the day when Mom loves me too much to keep me, and for every other person who will someday see that I'm not worth holding on to.

I’m so drunk,” I said through the bathroom door, though it wasn’t true. I’d declared it to him in my anxiety to take pressure and responsibility off of myself for what I wanted to do next. I had already decided I at least wanted to kiss him, be held. Yet my desire surprised me. I felt the weight of shame not only on rape now, but on sex too. I was confused by it. I felt unready to hold myself responsible for the decision if I slept with him.

In 2005, my mad half, HER was born... ME & HER: a Memoir of Madness, 2012.

I'm terrified. I'm fine. The world is changed and exactly as before. There are crows in my hair. I have no hair. Bring me a jug of wine. Bring me a kerchief to scrub spotlessly clean.

In a world where the most consequential things happen by chance, or from unfathomable causes, you don't look to reason for help. You consort with mysteries... They have been killed in place of you - in your place. You don't think it out, not at the time, not in those terms, but you can't help but feel it, and go on feeling it. It's the close call you have to keep escaping from, the unending doubt that you have a right to your own life. It's the corruption suffered by everyone who lives on, that henceforth they must wonder at the reason and probe its justice.

I name you today, heart fears. I am small, but you are smaller. You will not stop me. You have a voice, fears, and I must listen, but then I will open my heart. I will love you right to death.

In a funny way it's almost fun, having everything be so fucked up and managing to adjust. I guess you might say I'm proud. Proud of me, proud of my friends for managing to deal with this thing so well. For most people this would be the end of the world. They'd panic, their friends would panic. Things would get trampled in the stampede. But we've kept our heads, made the necessary allowances, ad can just ride this thing out. I'm pretty much just putting in time waiting for this cloud to blow over. Waiting for something to come along to make some sense out of all this. Killing time, waiting for some sort of cavalry to come over the hill. There's really not an awful lot I can do but wait. As long as there's no panic, we can hold out for damn near forever.

In a sick country every step to health is an insult to those who live on its sickness.

India teaches me again and again, that the categories into which I try to divide things don't hold up

Indie authors write, design, sell. Like magic, skip one and you make must read vanish.

I needed to stop hiding: I was raped. It was time to honestly be exactly who I was. I saw—the shame wasn't mine, it was his, and I could stop misrepresenting myself, and I could accept myself.

I never dreamed that one day I would be married to a woman, and that my dad's position at Focus would divide me from my family, rather than keep us focused on it, but that's what happened.

In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament.

I needed him like I needed air to breathe.

I needed only to allow myself to know what I already knew.

I needed to begin respecting my own body’s boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me. Moving forward, I wanted rules.

I never said to myself, I am longing; that feeling lived at a level below language.

I never want to make screw-you money like the rest of the financial services industry.

In France, Paul explained, good cooking was regarded as a combination of national sport and high art, and wine was always served with lunch and dinner. "The trick is moderation," he said.

In Ireland we have the phenomenon known as a "Spoiled Priest." Unlike a spoiled child, this does not refer to a Priest throwing a temper tantrum.

In late 1949, at two and a half years old, I arrived in Jamaica for the first time. I had crossed the Atlantic by air from England. My Jamaican father was studying in London, my European mother was sick, and so in true Jamaican style I was sent home to my grandparents.

In lovesickness we had found a common language.

In insomnia we encounter the very heart of love’s darkness: the essential otherness of the beloved.

I no longer needed to peel myself of my skin, or to hide. To Dash the colorless ephemeral things that existed just beneath my surface were as vivid as the beauty marks he traced on my cheek.

In my mother's book, a vegetarian is somebody who is not concern with his or her diet and health. "Someone who prefer bush and grass, as if they is sheeps and cows, is somebody who don't have enough food to put in his mouth," she always say. Only vegetarians eat dryfood regularly—and like to eat it, too. It is not considered normal for a person to cook food that doesn't have some amount o' meat or fish to go with it. Only someone who is starving, who don't have money to buy a fish head or a single flying fish or even the head of a dolphin—in other words, a person who is "catching his arse"—has to eat dryfood. A person at this stage is a person one remove from having to cook bakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

In order to write a memoir, I’ve sat still inside the swirling vortex of my own complicated history like a piece of old driftwood, battered by the sea. I’ve waited—sometimes patiently, sometimes in despair—for the story under pressure of concealment to reveal itself to me. I’ve been doing this work long enough to know that our feelings—that vast range of fear, joy, grief, sorrow, rage, you name it—are incoherent in the immediacy of the moment. It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters

I no longer believe there's any such thing as losing a woman. A man loses himself as women slip into the future.

I noticed a couple of dark things flying in a zigzagging pattern near the lights. I wondered what kind of night-flying strange birds they could be. Upon closer inspection, I realized they were bats.

I notice perfume smells on his shirts and even later hours. I suspect he's having an affair but really don't care.

I now understand that no learning that makes a difference to my soul’s evolutionary journey will come from the outside. Everything I need is inside….

Instead of an unhinged lunatic you may glimpse a punctured soul-a mere human being like you.