Memoir Quotes

I was his “little girl with the William Burroughs mind,” his “secret fairy,” “female Frank Zappa” and “window onto a magical world.” He said I fell to earth, leaving wing-marks on the ceilings of our dreams.

~ Jalina Mhyana

Transparent tubes divided Phil’s blood into shades of red, fading to straw colored plasma. I watched his fluid swirl past his shoulders and disappear into machines. He offered himself to blood banks all over the city, his plasma rushed to hospitals where it would circulate through other people’s bodies. The map of my love’s tapped arteries would look like a bloodshot eye over the city of Albuquerque. His blood bought us dinner. I dreamed he was my mother, and I nursed his arm. I wrote a poem about it, how I suckled his arm dry like a sore teat.

~ Jalina Mhyana

I am forever engaged in a silent battle in my head over whether or not to lift the fork to my mouth, and when I talk myself into doing so, I taste only shame. I have an eating disorder.

~ Jena Morrow

A lot of men tend to want modelsI tell men, unless they look like a model themselves, they can't expect to land one.

~ Trisha Ventker

You have what it takes! Believe! You are the one with the dream. You own it. And you will walk through the open doors. Nothing can stop you.. Risk, even if you make mistakes. So live with faith and abandon. Have some fun. You are being carried...

~ Evan Edwards

As I searched for food perfection, and as I gained weight, I began to realize that the race for perfection in anything was the path to destruction.

~ Rachael Rose Steil

Each of us is the enactor of our personal saga; we create the phantom of the self. We are the principal character in our personal story, as well as witnesses and reactors to the storylines of other persons whom we adore. We are each the composers of our evolving personal story; we are the protagonist of our personal life story.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

There was so little I wanted to carry. Packing my backpack took me all of four minutes

~ Aspen Matis

And Goneville? It is a name that kept coming up as I was writing this book, and each time its meaning shifted a little. It's almost Gonville, the suburb of Whanganui where Johnny Devlin, New Zealand's first rock 'n'roll star, grew up, so arguably the birthplace of New Zealand rock 'n'roll. But it is also an imaginary place that might be every obscure New Zealand town that every obscure New Zealand band ever played.

~ Nick Bollinger

Rock It, Read It.

~ Larry Acquaviva

Find It, Live It, Love It.

~ Larry Acquaviva

And there were the warm spaces in the music I loved the most, openings through which I could enter and lay my burdens down. There, behind the groove and riding on the melody, I was complete and free.

~ Rashod Ollison

He would never admit it, but he did have a heart of gold under all that crud.Solid, hard, impenetrable gold, but still gold, nonetheless.

~ Jessiqua Wittman

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.

~ Brittany Burgunder

I think of the privilege it is to be able to speak life over these hurting people and believe in new life for them as we strive to love them the way we've been loved by Christ, the privilege it is to watch His faithfulness unfold in their stories.

~ Katie Davis Majors

I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.

~ Koren Zailckas

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.

~ Ruth Wariner

Well, did anything interesting happen today?' [my father] would begin. And even before the daily question was completed I had eagerly launched into my narrative of every play, and almost every pitch, of that afternoon's contest. It never crossed my mind to wonder if, at the close of a day's work, he might find my lengthy account the least bit tedious. For there was mastery as well as pleasure in our nightly ritual. Through my knowledge, I commanded my father's undivided attention, the sign of his love. It would instill in me an early awareness of the power of narrative, which would introduce a lifetime of storytelling, fueled by the naive confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my father did.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

I never want to make screw-you money like the rest of the financial services industry.

~ Dan Price

I wept for my family, all if us, my beautiful, idyllic, lost family. I wept for our excesses, our delusions and inconsistencies; not that we had cared too much or too little, although both were true, but that we had let such extraordinary care be subverted into extraordinary carelessness. We'd been careless with the best of our many resources: each other. It was as though we had taken for granted the fact that there would be more where we had come from too; another chance, another summer, another Brooke, Bridget or Bill.

~ Brooke Hayward

No matter what else people may steal from you, they will never be able to take away your knowledge.

~ Adeline Yen Mah

I knew that I was the least-loved child because I was a girl and because my mother had died giving birth to me.

~ Adeline Yen Mah

In the early 1970s, racial and gender discrimination was still prevalent. The easy camaraderie prevailing in the operating room evaporated at the completion of surgical procedures. There was an unspoken pecking order of seating arrangements at lunch among my fellow physicians. At the top were the white male 'primary producers' in prestigious surgical specialties. They were followed by the internists. Next came the general practitioners. Last on the list were the hospital-based physicians: the radiologists, pathologists and anaesthesiologists - especially non-white, female ones like me. Apart from colour, we were shunned because we did not bring in patients ourselves but, like vultures, lived off the patients generated by other doctors. We were also resented because being hospital-based and not having to rent office space or hire nursing staff, we had low overheads. Since a physician's number of admissions to the hospital and referral pattern determined the degree of attention and regard accorded by colleagues, it was safe for our peers to ignore us and target those in position to send over income-producing referrals. This attitude was mirrored from the board of directors all the way down to the orderlies.

~ Adeline Yen Mah

Intimidated, old traumas triggered, and fearing for my safety, I did what I felt I needed to do.

~ Sierra D. Waters

John was still making comments regarding violent things that he shouldn't, but I hoped he was just being a big mouth. Nobody was going to listen to me anyway.

~ Sierra D. Waters

He told me that if I hung up, he'd do it. He would commit suicide. He told me that if I called the cops he would kill every single one of them and I knew that he had the potential and the means to do it

~ Sierra D. Waters

No amount of me trying to explain myself was doing any good. I didn't even know what was going on inside of me, so how could I have explained it to them?

~ Sierra D. Waters

It is not a single crime when a child is photographed while sexually assaulted (raped.) It is a life time crime that should have life time punishments attached to it. If the surviving child is, more often than not, going to suffer for life for the crime(s) committed against them, shouldn't the pedophiles suffer just as long? If it often takes decades for survivors to come to terms with exactly how much damage was caused to them, why are there time limits for prosecution?

~ Sierra D. Waters

The story of my birth that my mother told me went like this: When you were coming out I wasn't ready yet and neither was the nurse. The nurse tried to push you back in, but I shit on the table and when you came out, you landed in my shit.If there ever was a way to sum things up, the story of my birth was it.

~ Sierra D. Waters

I was the problem and the solution.

~ Abby Norman

The metaphysical poetry of our innovative life springs from the aesthetic, scenic, and systematic processes of inventiveness, the creative impulse of an active mind generating aesthetical intuition.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The bravest thing I ever did was leave there. The next bravest thing I did was come back, to make myself heard.

~ Aspen Matis

This is the only advice I offer you. Pick the small thing, and carry it on. Let it change your life.

~ Anna White

Courage is just dreams with shoes on.

~ Reba Riley

Music is not my life. My life is music.

~ Criss Jami

Maybe being broken helps you become a better person.

~ Paige Rawl

Each day has the potential of being your best day. You decide what each day will bring.

~ Paige Rawl

His fingerprints covered my skin.

~ C.j. English

He tilted my chin up and I swear those lips are magic. Witchcraft. Sorcery. Whatever it is in those lips, it’s addictive. Unassailable. I had to have more. More of this feeling of being wanted.

~ Taylor Rhodes

I drank from the crisp mountain stream, tasting filtered sky with a mossy undertone. I’ve never understood how being loved fully could change your entire perspective of the world. I only ever understood the wistfulness of it, and the longing and the frothy, violent bits. The mixed up, rained on parts. The escaped bits that smudge and bleed through. Slowly, I am coming to terms with how vulnerable I am to you, flat on my back like a submissive wolf pup. Daisy petals line your eyelashes, juice of a nectarine flavors your tongue. The side of your mouth twitches, hazy dreamscapes overtaking your mind while we bathe in the glorious autumn devastation.

~ Taylor Rhodes