Quotes by Memoirists

Joy, it is, which I've never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self-delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving.
Mary Karr
Excellence costs a great deal.
May Sarton
Most people have to talk so they won't hear.
May Sarton
No man is as anti-feminist as a really feminine woman.
Frank O'Connor
Looking repeatedly into the past you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life but rather with the phenomenon of memory.
Patricia Hampl
For inside all the weakness of old age the spirit God knows is as mercurial as it ever was.
May Sarton
There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
May Sarton
There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.
Seán O'Casey
We must like what we have when we don't have what we like.
Roger de Rabutin
What is destructive is impatience haste expecting too much too fast.
May Sarton
When we have not what we love we must love what we have.
Roger de Rabutin
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always she had to admit interesting.
May Sarton
Help us to be the always hopeful gardeners of the spirit who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth as without light nothing flowers.
May Sarton
Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
May Sarton
Each day and the living of it has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.
May Sarton
There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can so as to keep it out of as many things as possible.
Seán O'Casey
We must like what we have when we don't have what we like.
Roger de Rabutin
There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
May Sarton
What is destructive is impatience haste expecting too much too fast.
May Sarton
When we have not what we love we must love what we have.
Roger de Rabutin
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always she had to admit interesting.
May Sarton
Help us to be the always hopeful gardeners of the spirit who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth as without light nothing flowers.
May Sarton
Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
May Sarton
Each day and the living of it has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness.
May Sarton
The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him and when he is compelled to exist as it were by his own inner light.
Frank O'Connor
You cannot put a rope around the neck of an idea: you cannot put an idea up against a barrack-square wall and riddle it with bullets: you cannot confine it in the strongest prison cell that your slaves could ever build.
Seán O'Casey
Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
May Sarton
God is usually on the side of big squadrons and against little ones.
Roger de Bussy-Rabutin
Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.
May Sarton
I think a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
Mary Karr
We must like what we have when we don't have what we like.
Roger de Bussy-Rabutin
From a shy timid girl I had become a woman of resolute character who could no longer be frightened by the struggle with troubles.
Anna Dostoevsky
Life comes in clusters clusters of solitude then clusters when there is hardly time to breathe.
May Sarton
It's my rule never to lose my temper until it would be detrimental to keep it.
Seán O'Casey
We must like what we have when we don't have what we like.
Roger de Rabutin
What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.
Aminatta Forna
I can't say when you'll get love or how you'll find it or even promise you that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it's never too much to ask for it and that it's not crazy to fear you'll never have it again, even though your fears are probably wrong. Love is our essential nutrient. Without it, life has little meaning. It's the best thing we have to give and the most valuable thing we receive. It's worthy of all the hullabaloo.
Cheryl Strayed
Even years from now, once I've stopped drinking, I will never stop trusting extremes. I will always believe that anything worth having is worth having in excess. The good things are worth hoarding until you have a cookie-fat ass, sex-aching loins, joy that fires through you like popping popcorn, or love, the weakness at the sight of some boy who makes your chest ache like indigestion. If it's good for you, it ought to be good for you in any amount, and you should track down every available bit of it. And if it's toxic, if it turns your liver into a hard little rock of scar tissue, or curls your memory at the edges like something burned in a fire, or makes your stomach flop, or your mind ache, or your personality contorted, you shouldn't buy into the bullshit about temperance.
Koren Zailckas
How differently we behave in other peoples countries ... no sooner than we think we can get away with it, we do as we please. It doesn't require the breakdown of a social order. It takes a six-hour plane flight.
Aminatta Forna
Being smart and rich are lucky, but being curious and compassionate will save your ass. Being curious and compassionate can take you out of your ego and edge your soul towards wonder.
Mary Karr
Bad things are gonna' happen to you, because they happen to us all. And worrying won't stave the really bad things off. Don't make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other people's blow-dried outsides. Even the most privileged person in this stadium suffers the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human.
Mary Karr
A university is a city of ideas, and we're grateful you became citizens of our city.
Mary Karr
One chance--that's what she had seen she had--one flying leap that was really composed of eight thousand separate possibilities for falling, and she had taken that chance and come this far and been found out.
Haven Kimmel
…I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn’t seem to suffice, not really—rather’s it that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into it’s brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.
Mark Doty
You aren't happy," Estela says."I can't be happy," I say."Look at me, Kenzie.""I'm looking at you, Estela.""Do you know your own heart?""I don't know anything.""Go," she says, "and think. And don't come back until you know.
Beth Kephart
The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.
May Sarton
It's meant I will act like less of an asshole, but feel much more like one.
Koren Zailckas
I once heard someone say that the concept of moderation seems a little extreme, and tonight...I agree.
Koren Zailckas
But in college, we can wear our alcohol abuse as proudly as our university sweatshirts; the two concepts are virtually synonymous.
Koren Zailckas
The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there’s arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers much longer to get there.
Cheryl Strayed
a grin that wasn't natural, and that combined in a strange way affection and arrogance, the arrogance of the idealist who doesn't realize how easily he can be fooled.
Frank O'Connor
It's not about becoming a movie star. It's about the down-in-the-dirt art of inhabiting the person you aspire to be while carrying on your shoulders the uncertain and hungry man you know you are.
Cheryl Strayed
Have you ever watched a leaf leave a tree? It falls upward first, and then it drifts toward the ground, just as I find myself drifting towards you.
Beth Kephart
One of the things that happens a lot is you get to see how many times things happen, literal things happen and how they are completely metaphors for where you are. It’s like a mirror is being held up just about an inch to your face.
Cheryl Strayed
Just being out of the house with Daddy like this at Fisher's lights me up enough for somebody to read by me.
Mary Karr
You are to be pitied more than I, perhaps. I soar above all your innumerable miseries, partaking of the nature of the angels; for, as you have said, my place is not in your narrow sphere. You have the earth, I have boundless space. Enchained here below by the thousand bonds of your gross, material senses, your spirits cannot plunge into that limpid Ocean of the infinite, where, lost for a day upon your arid shores, my soul drinks deep.
Herculine Barbin
How, then, does the written word work? What part of a reader absorbs it - or should that be a double question: what part of a reader absorbs what part of a text? I think that underneath, or alongside, a reader's conscious response to a text, whatever is needy in him is taking in whatever the text offers to assuage that need.
Diana Athill
God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch.
Cheryl Strayed
But on that night as I gazed out over the darkening land fifty-some nights out on the PCT, it occurred to me that I didn't have to be amazed by him anymore.There were so many other amazing things in this world.They opened up inside of me like a river. Like I didn't know I could take a breath and then I breathed. I laughed with the joy of it, and the next moment i was crying my first tears on the PCT. I cried and I cried and I cried. I wasn't crying because I was happy. I wasn't crying because I was sad. I wasn't crying because of my mother or my father or Paul. I was crying because I was full. Of those fifty-some hard days on the trail and of the 9,760 days that had come before them too.I was entering. I was leaving. California streamed behind me like a long silk veil. I didn't feel like a big fat idiot anymore. And I didn't feel like a hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen. I felt fierce and humble and gathered up inside, like I was safe in this world too.
Cheryl Strayed
As close as we'd been when we were together, we were closer in our unraveling, telling each other everything at last, words that seemed to us might never have been spoken between two human beings before, so deep we went, saying everything that was beautiful and ugly and true.
Cheryl Strayed