Best 1003 quotes in «memoir quotes» category

By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...

Can you fail and still be strong, Can you not fit in and accept yourself, Can you lose everything and still keep searching, Can you be in the dark and still believe in the light.

Carmelina points at the cabin. "What is that?" I follow her finger to the log walls made of matchsticks, the miniature windows. The doorknob has fallen off along the way, but other than that it's intact. A perfect, tiny replica of the cabin in the forest. I can almost hear the Steller's jay, imagine its flash of blue, smell the lemony resin of the cedars. See daisies looped flower to stem upon dark hair. Feel a hand with a broad palm and rough fingers linked with mine. I smile at Carmelina. "That is home.

Cattle did not have to be led to water. They came eagerly to the trough and drank while Almanzo pumped, then they hurried back to the warm barns, and each went to its own place. Each cow turned into her own stall and put her head between her own stanchions. They never made a mistake. Whether this was because they had more sense than horses, or because they had so little sense that they did everything by habit, Father did not know.

Cemeteries are deceptive places. You go there for quiet remembering and find yourself assailed by noisy questions. If Mr. Wong didn't turn his back on his homeland, if he didn't forget it or forsake it, what then did he feel about becoming a Canadian citizen? Was it a statement of belonging?

ceremony is essential to humans: It's a circle that we draw around important events to separate the momentous from the ordinary. And ritual is a sort of magical safety harness that guides us from one stage of our lives into the next, making sure we don't stumble or lose ourselves along the way. Ceremony and ritual march us carefully right through the center of our deepest fears about change…

Children believe they are immortal, death is an empty word like the name of a country they’ve never been to on a time-faded map. I wasn’t a child anymore.

Childhood is a wilderness.

Children are often like hostages under the care of authority, with spankings and groundings nudging them like guns pointed at their skulls, threatening to shoot if the wrong words are uttered.

Choose this life. Choose this body. Say yes to all of it. Say yes to the beauty and the good and the ugly and the difficult. Choose what you have, what you are. Choose this moment. Choose to love and remember. You are full. You are alive.

Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had begun with the coercion of my body, with my own wild hope.

Chris didn’t need to learn how to conquer fear. He had to embrace it, walk with it and listen to it.

Christmas is such a time of struggle anyway, crammed with busy and hurry and the expectation that you will be joyful, no matter what. Then, if you’re like me, when you just sit quietly, just be, and let yourself feel what you feel, the guilt creeps in. Because you’re alive and the world is big, and you should be feeling some freakin’ Christmas spirit.

Come up here. Tell us your story.

Complete peace blankets me, and I am still. It's a familiar feeling, yet unknown to me like this before now. It comes in total stillness. Silence. And in this instant I know that Natalee is with God.I understand that from the moment she got into Deepak Kalpoe's car her heavenly Father wrapped His loving arms around her and cared for her through whatever ordeal she encountered that night. I don't know if she is alive or not, but I know that He is with her.

Courage is just dreams with shoes on.

Cooking is about surrender.

Damoder climbed slowly to his feet. 'Buy lot!' he wheedled, 'I am poor man. I sell you cheap. I am bank-Rupert! Apparently the only things that could save him from bank-rupertcy were our dollars.

Dance, dance for me Dance with the stars Laugh, laugh for me Wherever you are Sing, sing out loud Like angels do Remember me The way I'll remember you Love, love for me With all your soul Cry, cry for me As I grow old See, see me from the edge of Heaven's eye Feel for me 'cause feelings never die I'll remember you My very special friend Until we meet again (By Carrie Hamilton, Carol Burnett's daughter)

Despite your delusions to the contrary, swingers, by and large, are a civilized lot. We come in all ages, shapes, sizes, nationalities, and ethnicities. We have differing beliefs, varying opinions, IQs, and senses of humor. We have families, friends, careers, hobbies, mortgages, and retirement plans. In short, we’re just like everyone else. We don’t strap on leather chaps and nipple clamps to go about our day. Wearing kinks on our sleeves like badges of honor isn’t our style. Truth be told, we don’t talk that much about our dalliances—-at least not to Vanilla folk. We’re not ashamed. We simply assume most of the world doesn’t get our way of life. And more times than not, we’re right.

Darkness fell, revealing a sparkling night sky so beautiful that we decided to sleep out under the stars. At gray dawn, Phyllis woke me with an urgent voice. “Bill, Bill,” she said, “when I woke up I saw this huge boulder beside me, but it wasn’t there last night. Look! Look!” she said and pointed next to her. It was the huge buffalo bull! He had come back during the night and lay down beside us to sleep. I was awestruck. I felt so honored, so grateful, so loved. I loved that buffalo with all my heart and soul. I felt like he knew it, and that was why he had come back to sleep with us. But maybe there’s a different reason. Judith Niles, a wise spiritual friend of mine recently told me that the spontaneous melody is “the voice of the soul.” The minute she said it I knew she was right. Now I feel sure that the creatures responded to “the voice of the soul” amplified through my body. When we human beings finally get it together the natural world is going to respond to us in more wonderful ways than we can ever begin to imagine.

Debbie Downer" was one of the few sketches where I broke, and I remember watching Heratio Sanz laugh so hard that tears squirted out of his eyes. I still believe that sketch may be a cure for low-level depression if watched regularly.

Destiny is not always preordained. Life is about making choices. Our lives are the sum of all the choices we make, the bridges we cross, and the ones we burn. Our souls cast long shadows over many people, even after we are gone. Fate, luck, and providence are the consequence of our freedom of choice, not the determinants. When justice is served by following our principles, making good decisions brings us inner peace.

Dante Alighieri wrote his first book in the prosimetrum genre – La Vita Nuova – in 14th century Florence. Since I’m compiling this collection – my first indie publication – in Florence, just blocks from Dante’s house, and since his book involves a lost love, and ‘A New Life,’ I thought it fitting to emulate this style in my own casual, intuitive fashion. My hope is that the juxtaposition of poems, journal entries, essays and prose will create a story; a memoir in anarchistic vignettes.

death is not a pretty flower that had almost pricked me. It was not a small annoyance I could simply bypass and quickly disregard. It was really The End.

Don't live off your past successes or failures, live for the next big pursuit.

Doing a geographic” is a term alcoholics often use for acting on the impulse to start over by moving to a new town, or state, instead of making any internal changes. It’s the anywhere-but-here part of the disease that says, “Remove yourself from this, go someplace new, and everything will be better.” Two years into our Florida stint, my mother pulled a geographic as radical as the move from Rochester. The new plan was to head for California. She enrolled in the mathematics graduate program at the University of California’s shiny new campus in San Diego, and as soon as our elementary school let out for the summer, she put us into a new Buick station wagon – a gift from her parents – and drove us across the country. You’d think we’d have protested at yet another move. After all, having been duped before, we were in no position to believe that the next move would be any different. But I have no memory of being unhappy about the news. Because that’s what often happens when an alcoholic parent is doing a geographic. She pulls you in and, before you know it, you, too, believe in the promise of the new place.

Don't read their rubbish... Read mine ☺️

Dogs possess a quality that's rare among humans--the ability to make you feel valued just by being you--and it was something of a miracle to me to be on the receiving end of all that acceptance. The dog didn't care what I looked like, or what I did for a living, or what a train wreck of a life I'd led before I got her, or what we did from day to day. She just wanted to be with me, and that awareness gave me a singular sensation of delight. I kept her in a crate at night until she was housebroken, and in the mornings I'd let her up onto the bed with me. She'd writhe with joy at that. She'd wag her tail and squirm all over me, lick my neck and face and eyes and ears, get her paws all tangled in my braid, and I'd just lie there, and I'd feel those oceans of loss from my past ebbing back, ebbing away, and I'd hear myself laugh out loud.

Do I have the permission to succeed at this? Who am I to tell my stories? “Who are you to not tell them?” a writer friend said to me. This writer friend — author of novels, memoirs, a short story collection — tells me that it is ownership, the acceptance of the fact that our stories make us who we are, that is the most complicated and treacherous part of what we do. When that ownership is withheld, we cannot succeed. When other forces say, no, that story is not yours, they have not only killed it and its place in your soul; they have killed you.

Do not settle for status quo. Life always offers something better.

Don’t tell me that I can’t write a memoir just because I’m not world famous. I mean, when you really break it down I’m the most famous person currently sitting in my living room. The point is that I don’t like people telling me what I can’t do.

Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?" "Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.

Do your parents know you’re here?' asked the lady at social Services. ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I want to know about children’s homes.’ I had to stand on my toes to see over the reception desk.

Each day has the potential of being your best day. You decide what each day will bring.

Dream the Painting and Wake up and Paint the Dream.

During these three months I have gone through much; I mean, I have gone through much in myself; and now there are the things I am going to see and go through. There will be much to be written.

Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album.

Each generation identifies with a small group of people said to have lived lives exemplifying the vices and virtues of that generation. If one were to choose a trial lawyer whose life reflected the unique characteristics of America’s “Wild West” of a criminal justice system in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, that person likely would be my father. New York City of the 1960s until the turn of the 21st century was the world’s epicenter of organized and white-collar crime. During those four decades, the most feared mafia chiefs, assassins, counterfeiters, Orthodox Jewish money launderers, defrocked politicians of every stripe, and Arab bankers arriving in the dead of night in their private jets, sought the counsel of one man: my father, Jimmy La Rossa. Once a Kennedy-era prosecutor, Brooklyn-born Jimmy La Rossa became one of the greatest criminal trial lawyers of his day. He was the one man who knew where all of the bodies were buried, and everyone knew it. It seemed incomprehensible that Jimmy would one day just disappear from New York. Forever. After stealing my dying father from New York Presbyterian Hospital to a waiting Medevac jet, the La Rossa Boys, as we became known, spent the next five years in a place where few would look for two diehard New Yorkers: a coastal town in the South Bay of Los Angeles, aptly named Manhattan Beach. While I cooked him his favorite Italian dishes and kept him alive using the most advanced medical equipment and drugs, my father and I documented our notorious and cinematic life together as equal parts biography and memoir. This is our story.

Each person in the group said something except for me. My silence became noticed. About halfway through the meeting I started to think, I've got to talk. Today, I've got to talk. Fear racked me so bad that sweat ran down my sides. I thought, After the curly-haired woman stops talking I'll raise my hand. A man with a cocky smile told the curly woman that her story was nothing compared to his, he'd been passed out cold from heroin and God knows what, and I wanted to tell him to quit glorifying hinself. I was just about to say the words, a few faces turned toward me as if they could sense my imminent speech, when a man across the circle interrupted. The opportunity passed; what I wanted to say wouldn't fit now. I tilted on the back two legs of the chair and waited for my desire to speak and be noticed and be part of the group to travel back through my nervous system. Up the synapses condemnation rushed: Why couldn't I spit something out like a normal person?

Even now, I see his damp hair crowding at his forehead. His eyes, cerulean, the same as my mother's. Him, favoring the skin of any water to me. I remember him moving with it, and staying. That ripe light and intermittence. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever stop looking for him there.

Ensuring that our home planet is healthy and life sustaining is an overwhelming priority that undercuts all other human activities. The ship must first float. Our failure to grasp these fundamental tenants of existence will be our undoing. And one thing is for certain. No calvary is going to come charging to our rescue. We are going to have to rescue ourselves or die trying. Workable solutions are urgently needed. Saving seals and tigers or fighting yet another oil pipeline through a wilderness area, while laudable, is merely shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. The real issue is our elementary accord with Earth and the plant and animal kingdoms has to be revitalized and re-understood. The burning question is, How?

Even now, every job I get, I worry that it will be my last. I think becoming a washed-up hag is sort of my destiny. So if you see a wrinkled old bitch wearing a tattered fur and chain-smoking in an off-Broadway back alley...that’s just me. Starting four years from now.

Even now, I am anxious about the naked thoughts that I have shared. The observations are blisteringly honest and of course they have to be.

Even sentenced to twenty-five years in prison Ted didn’t get what he deserved. Maybe his prison mates would give it to him.

Every book has to wait for the right time to be read and understood.

Every day is a new beginning, the building of a habit. Every action is a step in some direction. There is no pause in living.

Every crossroad in life has four options – quit, adapt, proceed, or accept, but quitting is a dead-end.

Everything we have, everything we are, is a gift. How can we judge and shame ourselves if this is true?

Everyone has a colorful life. You just have to get out your crayons.