Best 1003 quotes in «memoir quotes» category

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

The high road 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 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.

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

...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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 only way to move forward is to focus on the good in your life and the good that you are doing for others and yourself. My past has shown me things in life, others and myself that I wouldn't wish upon anyone, but I can choose to pick up the pieces and build a beautiful life for myself and help others to do the same.

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.

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

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 ordinary stories of our ordinary lives have extraordinary gifts coded within them. . .

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

The past always has a way of repeating itself, but thankfully it’s never exactly the same.

The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it.

The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map.

The past is gone. It is now always today.

The piper never knew we were watchers.....Sounds echoed - sounds of a Scottish love song. They echoed through the silence, soft and melancholy, as he kept time with his foot, and the metal of the bagpipes glinted, through faint moonshine, and lifting fog

The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means 'two,' and the word zweifel, which means 'doubt' - suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life's journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers - always measuring our lives against some other person's life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead.

The point, I decided, wasn't to have the autobiography or even the memories. The point was who I became when I wrote.

There are a lake and a mountain at the roof of the world where the air is thin and the clouds linger on cliffsides. These are places of wonder and the journey to see them will take many days. My cousin, Pallu, and I do not know if we will make it to these places or what drives us to go, but this is a journey we promised ourselves decades ago when we were still schoolgirls.

The purpose of my life is not to get what I want. The purpose of my life is to become who I am.

There are bald patches, like Daddy's head, on the pebble-dash, higher up than last year. I have picked off the stones. (I was a graffiti artist. No words, no pictures. The trace of identity marked in spaces.

There are no answers, only choices.

There are lots of real reasons to decide to leave something or someone, but there are lots of other reasons that are less valid and less real and less about a relationship than our own minds: Fear (of screwing up, of being left, of not being good enough), restlessness, resistance to growing up, PMS, not knowing how to live without drama, fearing that you're getting happy, and happiness is boring. The thing that scared me the most was the knowledge that if I stayed, something was going to change, and that something was probably me. I didn't know what changed me would look like, or if I would like her more or less than I already did. Would I still recognize myself? Would I still be myself?

There is a place for what my heart tells me about you, and there is no shame or guilt in it. God Himself is free to look in my heart right this instant and I know He would not shame or admonish me about what He would see there because the pure, ego-less truth of how I hold you in my heart deserves to be kept alive.

There is an element of selfishness to this, I suppose. It feels pretty good to be able to so quickly help someone. That is, after all, one of the great emotional payoffs of medicine. That isn't to say that ECT is either a panacea or without flaws - but when used in the right way for the right purposes it's of great benefit, and condemning it because it isn't perfect would lead to more suffering and harm, no less.

There is an element of selfishness to this, I suppose. It feels pretty good to be able to so quickly help someone. That is, after all, one of the great emotional payoffs of medicine. That isn't to say that ECT is either a panacea or without flaws - but when used in the right way for the right purposes it's of great benefit, and condemning it because it isn't perfect would lead to more suffering and harm, no less. It was one of the most difficult things I have ever done in my life. I have memory problems as a residual of it; however, I'm alive. That was the main point.

There is nothing opposed in Biometry and Mendelism. Your husband and I worked that out at Peppards [on the Chilterns] and you will see it referred in the Biometrika memoir. The Mendelian formula leads up to the 'ancestral law'. What we fought against was the slovenliness in applying Mendel's categories and asserting that such formulae apply in cases when they did not.

There is no such thing as loving a child too much.

There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's own experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least, in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured.

There's nothing gay about living life straight

There's no place like home. No place safer. No place scarier.

There's nothing that can't be made harder.

There occurs the beautiful feeling that only humanity together is the true human being, and that the individual can be cheerful and happy only if he has the courage to feel himself in the Whole.

There’s irony in a beautiful curl slowly turning into a tangled mess, beyond resurrection, in a matter of minutes.

There's this parallel, perhaps less conscious desire, which is to numb myself to the world. To deal with the world tomorrow. Living is difficult. Dying is difficult.