Quotes by Memoirists - Page 6

Perhaps by now I'd come far enough that I had the guts to be afraid.
Cheryl Strayed
A man and woman in search of something are always blown apart, but it's the same wind that blows them.
Frank O'Connor
moonlight the falsest the most languid the most petit-bourgeoisstrikes meI like it
Nâzım Hikmet
I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
Patricia Hampl
Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.
Beth Kephart
You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.
Patricia Hampl
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
May Sarton
I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.
May Sarton
For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.
May Sarton
Faith is not a feeling, she says. It's a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope.
Mary Karr
I was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith,or if there was such a place,or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.
Cheryl Strayed
Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.
Mary Karr
Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
May Sarton
What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?
Mark Doty
I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.
Mary Karr
Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?
Lucy Grealy
And then we ease him out of that worn-out body with a kiss, and he's gone like a whisper, the easiest breath.
Mark Doty
I am not ready to die,But I am learning to trust deathAs I have trusted life.I am movingToward a new freedom
May Sarton
The healing power of even the most microscopic exchange with someone who knows in a flash precisely what you're talking about because she experienced that thing too cannot be overestimated.
Cheryl Strayed
Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.
Mary Karr
Where music thundered let the mind be still,Where the will triumphed let there be no will,What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.
May Sarton
What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.
Mary Karr
When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.
Seán O'Casey
He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.
Cheryl Strayed
it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.
Mary Karr
The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.
May Sarton
I suppose we all have our little hiding-hole if the truth was known, but as small as it is, the whole world is in it, and bit by bit grows on us again till the day You find us out.
Frank O'Connor
Mother’s particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.
Mary Karr
I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try and call on it, just like a light bulb cracking off when you throw the switch.
Lucy Grealy
Love, I think, is a gateway to the world, not an escape from it.
Mark Doty
A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
Mary Karr
One day can change your life. One day can ruin your life. All life is is three or four big days that change everything.
Beverly Donofrio
I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.
Cheryl Strayed
All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
Seán O'Casey
We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
May Sarton
Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it inflames the great.
Roger de Rabutin de Bussy