Best 1003 quotes in «memoir quotes» category

It's one thing to have a divinely inspired love given to you to experience and share; it's something else altogether to recognize it when it appears. Our job is to go on being humbled and grateful that we should get to experience such a thing in our lifetimes, and preserve its magic by doing the most responsible thing possible to keep it alive . . . Just keep saying yes.

It's only natural for people to fall, but there are people who, even if they fall, jump right back up right away and run forward, and there are people who just keep sitting there, crying.

It starts with a single breath and the present moment, but where it takes you is into the vast radiance of your true nature, into a magical, spacious life.

It's the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim

It's the same with the wound in our hearts. We need to give them our attention so that they can heal. Otherwise the wounds continue to cause us pain. Sometimes for a very long time. We're all going to get hurt. But here's the trick - they also serve an amazing purpose. When our hearts are wounded that's when they open. We grow through pain. We grow through difficult situations. That's why you have to embrace each and every difficult thing in your life.

It's very kind of you to take us in," said the vicar, smiling. "We're so sorry if we've put you out at all." "Not at all!" I said, lying through my teeth.

It takes all my strength to do daily tasks. To some people, I’m just a number. I’m a projected food stamps debit card lifetime member. I’m seen as crazy or insane, but it doesn’t matter. I know I am bigger than my suffering.

It took me almost two thousand miles in the woods to see I had to do some hard work that wasn’t simply walking—that 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. First—when I felt unsafe I’d leave, immediately. The first time, not the tenth time. Not after a hundred red flags smacked in wind violently, clear as trail signs pointing the way to SNAKES. Not after I’d been bitten—the violation. If I wasn’t interested, I would reject the man blatantly.

It was as if hell itself had taken human form and come up from the abyss.

It was as if we'd known each other for a thousand years.

It was difficult to go to one of my favorite Asian restaurants alongside the southern section of the square. All around the front door, the exterior of the building looked like it’d had a bad case of acne due to pitting—but the small round holes were from bullets.

It was breathtaking. It felt like being inside the beating heart of that pulsating, exotic nation.

It was clear that most of my insecurities originated from my need to have things be “perfect.” I wasn’t sure what bothered me more; the fact that I had no control over the changes of my body and hair or that this horrible situation was only happening to me.

It was heartbreaking to realize how we can fail the people we most love without even trying.

It was impossible not to fall in love with him.

It was my first lesson in the fragility of attraction.

It wasn’t really a loud-mouthed, hyperactive little pig-tailed blonde that made Carl cringe. It was what I represented. While his upbringing was battered humiliation, I was spoiled, doted on, and spoon-fed by the world. I don’t think he was even aware of his intentions to reduce that child to his own state of self-loathing, but he was truly brilliant at it.

It was October in Pennsylvania and on the first morning the ground was frosted. As I walked to breakfast, some guy yelled out, ‘Thirteen inches in the Poconos.’ ‘Is that I porn film?’ I asked.

It was one of those striking moments in life where you find familiarity in the inexplicable.

It was soothing to sit with life-long friends, the cacophony of bar sounds around us while we caught up on our lives and talked about the glory days of high school. My life since then had been on an accelerated trajectory, not always aimed in the best direction. I acquired a sense of well-being from those friends who married their high school sweethearts, set up housekeeping a stone's throw from where they grew up, and kept the heartbeat of small-town living beating rhythmically.

It was suddenly Technicolor clear: the only thing holding me from giving myself vision this entire time had actually simply been me. I saw how in the fall and winter of my childhood, I'd walked through the golden aspens. And then I simply committed and gave myself my own eyes. I had once again proven that again alone, I was again enough.

It was the last time I would ever do that.

It was too much happiness. Happiness puts you at too much risk - what if you were to lose it? Too much happiness is a paradox. It's a tragedy, even: getting something you've always wanted but being unable to keep it.

I understood then, with absolute certainty, that the ability of the horse to sense emotion, energy and spirit is beyond what most of the human world realises. This is why their impact on us can be so instant, so consistently positive, so transformational.

I used to think a drug addict was someone who lived on the far edges of society. Wild-eyed, shaven-headed and living in a filthy squat. That was until I became one...

I understood that it is beyond maniacal to harm someone who loved me privately, and then publicly atone for that harm I've done to that person in a publication for cheap male-feminist points and corporate money. While I have been harmed and abused as a kid, I have never had to experience watching someone publicly narratively confess to abusing me because they too were abused for money.

I usually enjoy setting up a new kitchen, but this has become a joyless and highly charged task. My mother and I each have our own set of kitchen boxes, which means that if there are two cheese graters between us, only one will make it into a cupboard. The other will be put back in a box or given to Goodwill. Each such little decision has the weight of a Middle East negotiation. While her kitchenware is serviceable, I’m a sucker for the high end: All-Clad saucepans and Emile Henry pie dishes. Before long, I’m shaking my head at pretty much everything my mother removes from her San Diego boxes. She takes each rejected item as a personal slight – which in fact it is. I begrudge her even her lightweight bowls, which she can lift easily with her injured hand. Here she is, a fragile old woman barely able to bend down as she peers into a low cupboard, looking for a place where she can share life with her grown daughter. At such a sight my heart should be big, but it’s small, so small that when I see her start stuffing her serving spoons into the same drawer as my own sturdy pieces, lovingly accumulated over the years, it makes me crazy. Suddenly I’m acting out decades of unvoiced anger about my mother’s parenting, which seems to be materializing in the form of her makeshift collection of kitchenware being unpacked into my drawers. When I became a mother myself, I developed a self-righteous sense of superiority to my mother: I was better than my mother, for having successfully picked myself up and dusted myself off, for never having lain in bed for days on end, too blotto to get my child off to school or even to know if it was a school day. By sheer force of will and strength of character, I believed, I had risen above all that she succumbed to and skirted all that I might have inherited. This, of course, is too obnoxiously smug to say in words. So I say it with flatware.

I've always thought about how I would act in certain situations. What would I do if I was inside a bank and it was being robbed? What if I was on an airplane and it was about to crash? I always imagined how I would behave: would it be confidently and heroically? Or would I be overcome with fear and panic? In the end, you never really know how you will react unless, and until, you are living in that situation.

I've always let my imagination run free, but now I try to rein it in. Things never turn out the way I imagine, so I am letting them rest. Instead, I am holding just what is in my hand.

I've had cancer twice and if I had to pick one fate for you, cancer or fertility problems-I'd pick cancer.

I've been a storyteller since I was six years old when my mother had her first series of electroshock therapy treatments. I made up stories to keep my sisters quiet while mom slept." Dear Deb "I didn't know how it felt to have cancer, but I knew about fear." Dear Deb "Two people have tried to kill me. The first person was my mother." Dear Deb "I used to believe there were big miracles and little miracles. But, I'm not so sure God measures miracles." Dear Deb "I was raised to believe forgiveness was a gift I was supposed to give the person who hurt me, but that felt like giving a bully an ice cream cone after he pushed me down on the playground." Dear Deb "Miracles are one of God's ways of getting our attention. I know he got mine. It's a miracle I'm here." Dear Deb

I’ve heard that sometimes a version of you must die before another more enlightened version can be born. I think that’s true after watching the corpse of myself walk around.

I walked without breaks, slept through nights without waking, inhumanly smooth – a small machine.

I’ve written for those who want to learn, truly learn, about a community with which they aren’t familiar. Or for those who have preconceptions but can admit they may not be entirely accurate (and, in some cases, that they are completely wrong). This means my reader must possess an open mind and a certain level of curiosity. If that’s you, proceed to checkout. An uncensored glimpse behind the curtain, hairy backs and all, awaits.

I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love.

I wanted nothing more out of life than I did to keep my family together and make sure they were safe. The memory of those days reminds me of how exhausted I had been, but my siblings gave my life purpose, they were my bridge from pain to healing, from past to future. They are as much the authors of my survival as I am of theirs.

I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic.

I wanted the fairytale.

I wanted to know what it felt like to be loved by the man of my dreams.

I want my heart to be the thin place. I don't want to board a plane to feel the kiss of heaven. I want to carry it with me wherever I go. I want my fragile, hurting heart, to recognize fleeting kairos, eternal moments as they pass. I want to be my own mountain and my own retreat.

I wanted to come close to fierce wild things. They seemed prehistoric, rare and sacred.

I want to be the last girl in the world with a story like mine.

I want to sling a stone, a small rock into a pool, see it ripple. I want to shake a tree, create a small storm..

I wanted him to declare in shock how overlooked and underestimated I had been ever since I was a child. How lucky he felt to be the one to have discovered me, to have me. I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic.

I want to watch you walk through the world before you leave it and if you stumble I'll rush forward to catch you. I like to think I'd show you the kindness you never showed me. I'd like you to owe me a favour. I want to show you that I did it. I want you to be proud of me.

I want to share my story, and I want to know yours. I believe with all my heart that sharing our stories, the real, ugly, broken ones, is one of the most powerful things in the world, because to share our story we must first accept it. We must own it. We must stop running from it or shoving it into the corner when company comes over. To share our story is to admit that we've been changed.

I was an unwilling passenger leaving the Big Country. I would miss the mountains and the waterfalls,the treks on broad horses' backs to hidden villages in secret valleys.

I was beginning to feel compassion for myself.

I was climbing high, high up Pen Dinas Head among the sparkling yellow gorse, sea birds and white heather, with the oily sheep huddled together against the wind

I was going to mean what I said, to be direct and firm. I found my moleskin notebook and on the page behind the pages addressed to Never-Never and my family—two unsent letters—I wrote: I am the director of my life.