Memoir Quotes - Page 8

Always remember that your memoir is never about you. It's about your reader. At it's core, it's about that shared space where we all experience the timeless truths of what it means to be human.

Jerry Payne

I think, generally speaking, that children have a knack for picking up curse words. Having said that, my brother and I (although admittedly, it was I who displayed a higher level of fluency) took to cursing like frogs take to jumping. Mind you, we received excellent tutoring along the way.

J.P. Sexton

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.

George Hodgman

That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand.

Christopher Isherwood

Once, when I was about ten, we were approaching the ranch after veering north to look at some pasturage when we saw a small barefoot boy racing along the hot road with terror in his face. My father just managed to stop him. Though incoherent with fear, the boy managed to inform us that his little brother had just drowned in the horse trough. My father grabbed the boy and we went racing up to the farmhouse, where the anguished mother, the drowned child in her arms, was sobbing, crying out in German, and rocking in a rocking chair. Fortunately the boy was not quite dead. My father managed to get him away from his mother long enough to stretch him out on the porch and squeeze the water out of him. In a while the boy began to belch dirty fluids and then to breathe again. The crisis past, we went on home. The graceful German mother brought my father jars of her best sauerkraut for many, many years.

Larry McMurtry

Writing, too, is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you wrote, it pours out of you. If you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else. You don't only listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck. Listening is receptivity. The deeper you can listen, the better you can write. You can take in the way things are without judgment, and the next day you can write the truth about the way things are."...If you can capture the way things are that's all the poetry you ever need.

Natalie Goldberg

He clenched his small fist, bellowed his rage to the heavens, and resolved to never again recognize the authority of any man on earth.

Patricia Lockwood

We are not defined by what knocks us down - we are defined by how e get back up

Madeleine Black

I opened the curtain and entered the confessional, a dark wooden booth built into the side wall of the church. As I knelt on the small worn bench, I could hear a boy's halting confession through the wall, his prescribed penance inaudible as the panel slid open on my side and the priest directed his attention to me."Yes, my child," he inquired softly. "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my First Confession." "Yes, my child, and what sins have you committed?" ...."I talked in church twenty times, I disobeyed my mother five times, I wished harm to others several times, I told a fib three times, I talked back to my teacher twice." I held my breath. "And to whom did you wish harm?" My scheme had failed. He had picked out the one group of sins that most troubled me. Speaking as softly as I could, I made my admission. "I wished harm to Allie Reynolds." "The Yankee pitcher?" he asked, surprise and concern in his voice. "And how did you wish to harm him?" "I wanted him to break his arm." "And how often did you make this wish?" "Every night," I admitted, "before going to bed, in my prayers." "And were there others?" "Oh, yes," I admitted. "I wished that Robin Roberts of the Phillies would fall down the steps of his stoop, and that Richie Ashburn would break his hand." "Is there anything else?" "Yes, I wished that Enos Slaughter of the Cards would break his ankle, that Phil Rizzuto of the Yanks would fracture a rib, and that Alvin Dark of the Giants would hurt his knee." But, I hastened to add, "I wished that all these injuries would go away once the baseball season ended." ..."Are there any other sins, my child?" "No, Father." "For your penance, say two Hail Mary's, three Our Fathers, and," he added with a chuckle, "say a special prayer for the Dodgers. ...

Doris Kearns Goodwin

She asks to see my diploma, holds it in her hands and smiles, reads it out loud before handing it back to me, and I hold it tightly on my lap, this piece of paper, the proof they won't find me dead on a couch on my thirty-eighth birthday or in some basement bathtub with my eyes wide and lifeless or alone in the bed I slept in as a child with a Baggie of white powder under my mattress.

Kenny Porpora

They say the truth will set you free, but what they neglect to mention is what happens when the truth isn't what you want to hear.

Connor Franta

Love each other or perish

Mitch Album

I am not here to make you feel better, I am just here to make you feel worse

Courtney Love

We are living in an artificial world—a world of fantasies and illusions. We've learned beautiful phrases but haven't learned yet how to carry out that little bit that we know. Our brains are stuffed with quotations, while at the same time nine out of ten of these dogmas are incomprehensible, murky, or lies. Which are worthwhile and which are not? Yes, I must stop being false before others and myself. How simple it all seems! But how do I do this? Let just a little time pass, and then we may understand—only the simplest, honorable acts determine the value of a man. Only I myself can and must help myself to become an adult.

Boris Gorbachevsky

Tomorrow is promised to no one so live your life fully everyday.

Therese Crutcher-Marin

I'm just scared I won't run as fast as I did my freshman year,' I admitted, choking back tears.Coach Woj looked at me for a moment, his eye gentle.'You don't have to.

Rachael Rose Steil

I held the cardboard and felt its scissor-cut edge. And for the first time I understood the shape of my grief. I could feel exactly how big it was. It was the strangest feeling, like holding something the size of a mountain in my arms. You have to be patient, he had said. If you want to see something very much, you just have to be patient and wait. There was no patience in my waiting, but time had passed all the same, and worked its careful magic. And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love.

Helen Macdonald

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.

John Conrad

Writing a personal essay or memoir addresses how a person thinks and behaves in the context of society’s prevailing moral and ethical codes, informal rules, laws, and customs. A self-ethnographer emphasis what he or she considers important regarding how people perceive and categorize the world, their meaning for behavior, how they imagine and explain things, and ascertaining what has meaning for them. Expository writing, a discursive examination of a broad field of subjects, is one method of cohering the dimensions of a person’s emic and etic thoughts and a linked series of memorable events into a unified personal ideology how to live a purposeful life. In cultural anthropology, the emic approach focuses on what people of a local culture think and how they interpret events whereas the etic approach takes a more objective view of how an outsider evaluates the behavior and customs of a culture. Usage of both emic and etic analysis provides the richest description of a cultural or a society in which the personal essayist operates within.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Attempting to express a person’s objective reality and subjective state of mind with the written word is an endless task because writing alters our perception of reality and amends our mental equilibrium.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing the story of their own life allows the author to parse their story into examinable segments while continuing to engage in the act of communion and creation.

Kilroy J. Oldster

In two months, I think, my college job will end. In two months I will have no office, no college, no salary, no home. Everything will be different. But, I think, everything already is. When Alice dropped down the rabbit-hole into Wonderland she fell so slowly she could take things from the cupboards and bookshelves on the walls, look curiously at the maps and pictures that passed her by. In my three years as a Cambridge Fellow there’d been lectures and libraries and college meetings, supervisions, admissions interviews, late nights of paper-writing and essay-marking, and other things soaked in Cantabrian glamour: eating pheasant by candlelight at High Table while snow dashed itself in flurries against the leaded glass and carols were sung and the port was passed and the silver glittered upon dark-polished refectory tables. Now, standing on a cricket pitch with a hawk on my hand, I knew I had always been falling as I moved past these things. I could reach out and touch them, pick them off their shelves and replace them, but they were not mine. Not really ever mine. Alice, falling, looked down to see where she was headed, but everything below her was darkness.

Helen Macdonald

The downside is the fear.The fear of something happening to her, the pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean.I hope you do for your sake.

David Mitchell

In the beginning, I only wanted to know, love, and serve God and understand the Bible. What harm could that possibly bring?

Charlene L. Edge

July 22, 2009At times I still feel lost, but I also feel the comfort of my Lord through the physical pain and the mental challenges. I know He’s there. I can feel Him in the sun beaming down on my brown skin. It feels like love and comfort. It feels like He’s holding me when I suffer and I’m not alone.

Jacquelyn Nicole Davis

The act of writing involves documenting and studiously examining interactions of all aspects of the self, the environment, and culture. Writing is an illustrious act of self-expression. Writing resembles a ‘coming of the age’ story because the ongoing process of defining a person’s personality and character is representative of the synergistic product of the continuous and cumulative interaction of an organic self with the world, the constant process of developing psychological, social, cognitive and ethical self.

Kilroy J. Oldster

She had always thought the word 'pheromones' made it sound as though molecules were floating in the air, shaped like little fluted horns, ready to attach themselves to the nearest target. Microscopic Edison phonographs flying about, their brassy mouths puckered to sucker onto bare unsuspecting skin. These were what he sent out to her. The pheromones. The eyeless babies of energy.

Alice Pung

Betrayal is sacred when the heart can encompass the whole.

Nancy Wait

My mother taught me that an important word in any language is while. while one thing is happening so is another. While someone is in darkness another is in daylight.While person dies another is born.

Margaret Leis HannaBrunhilde Maurer Barron Barron

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story.

Dorothy Gallagher

As the lights fade to a distant glow, I look back toward the city and imagine, somewhere in all of those lives, a little girl who is a lot like me. Maybe she rides in a car thinking about someone living far away from these lights and people. Even though our lives are separated by so much I wonder if she imagines the world through eyes like mine.

Noriko Nakada

Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn't do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives. They have seen themselves in extreme circumstances and, in that, they have seen their own extremes.

Fern Schumer Chapman

In 2005, my mad half, HER was born... ME & HER: a Memoir of Madness, 2012.

Karen Tyrrell

Now, through an act as simple as walking across a stage and collecting an empty plastic folder representing a degree, our stock had plummeted to nothing, the wretched leavings of some cosmic Ponzi scheme. A lifetime's worth of planning and training and delusion gone with the wind. Some of us were moving home to live free of charge in our parents' guest rooms, or if we were thin enough, heading west to try our luck in L.A.; others, to our collective horror, were being forced to work at actual jobs.

Rachel Shukert

Ignore the misery. Custom invites you to ignore the misery."SHOW YOUR TONGUE

Günter Grass

This is a work of memory -- facts have been altered. Names have been changed.

Lavinia Greenlaw

Sometimes I feel she hasn't left...especially when I wear the photo charm necklace with her picture in it. I can't tell you how many young men have stared into that picture and the reaction is always the same: a slow beam rises across their faces and they want to know all about her. They become entranced the way Dana Andrews did when he first saw Gene Tierney's portrait in "Laura." I know Maria finds all of this quite amusing; why shouldn't she? 'Laura' is her middle name.

Pamela Palmer Mutino

Murphy's law inverted: What can go right, will go right. (Works if you're an optimist.)

Saloma Miller Furlong

To me he seemed one of those persons destined to failure of whom you wonder what purpose it can ever serve that they should have ben born.

W Somerset Maugham

I recount as this journey begins where I rest to gather the tale from thissame old house resting on the hill, leaving me a view of a carnival once seen from just across the tracks. My pallet is dry now. The colors I see no more. The rain has washed away many of the signs that once stood for a prosperhome and family. My grave is waiting. The dreams once filled my head withimages of world unison, hope and companionship for all. The saga spokenthrough my canvas drew darker as the years went on to the bitter cold nights.All that comes to me now are glimpses of faces that graced my soul.

Kris Courtney

I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul.

Joy Harjo

Murphy's law inverted: What can go right, will go right.

Saloma Miller Furlong

I just want to see places – something inside me just makes me keep moving.

Jackie Sarah Parry

Looking back on the eruption, asking God why I had somehow been chosen to be afflicted with this damn disease, the fairer question would have been, “Why not me?” Why should I have been exempted from holding the proverbial short straw?

Ken Cruickshank

My mother was everything to me…and then I got married…and my husband became everything to me. It struck me then… Regret was a wasted emotion… Guilt was even worse. But who can escape these destructive feelings? Who can pretend they didn’t exist?

Cécile Rischmann

A garden is never finished. In that sense it is like the human world and all human undertakings.

Karel Čapek

A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.

Guy Sajer

I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.

Darin Strauss

...We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned withpot coffin or ceremony, our hasty untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.

Ghada Karmi

If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it?

S. Kelley Harrell

I write so that my handful of pebbles, cast daily into still waters, will produce a ripple.

Anne Schroeder

Love was a verb with a certain amount of energy attached to it - a daily quota - and you had to choose on whom you wanted to spend this energy. That was love. That was why people had to pray for it. If it were not finite, no one would pine for love in their lives - they would just wait to receive or learn to give.

Alice Pung

Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us to little more than animals, humanity in the shape of our saintly medical officers triumphed over barbarism.Remember, while it always seems darkest before the dawn, perseverance pays off and the good times will return.

Alistair Urquhart

Love was like notches on a speaker that could be cranked up and down, the decibels of desire, the frequencies of feeling. Sometimes she thought that she might have cranked it all the way up and broken the dial before the music had even started.

Alice Pung

Even wondered about the difference?Autobiography: The usually self-serving accounts of personal accomplishments by a public figure.Memoir: The usually self-serving accounts of someone whose only accomplishments are often self-pity and vindictiveness.

Raul Ramos y Sanchez

Who have you helped today"?

The memoirs of call girls are much in demand these days - a millennial craze.

Dimitra Ekmektsis

There is a cost to loving anything, or anyone. No one tells you that when you are young.

Shuly Xóchitl Cawood

Disney will never make a movie about my life story, and that's a shame--I'd make a really cute animated creature.

Kate Bornstein

The clown was an evil one. They’re either good or bad, and this one was definitely the latter.

Chris Thrall

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Memoir Quotes - Page 8

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