Memoir Quotes

I would rather have 10,000 stories than 10,000 in my bank account @myhumancompass Roy ('Backpack') Baron author of Looking Glass Shattered.

~ Daniel Roy Baron

As I travelled south through Europe everything got bigger. This applied to nice things like fruit-the nectarines and tomatoes were about six times as large in Greece as they were in Britain for example. But the principle also applied to unpleasant things, like spiders, and worms, and all other nameless and horrifying insects and arachnids of Greece.

~ Margaret Eleanor Leigh

The website increases my excitement when I read, “Hark, the pies are calling!” My excitement is short-lived, however. I read the page again and realize that it is “pipes” that are calling, not “pies” as I had hoped. I am disappointed. I personally react better to the call of pies.

~ Aefa Mulholland

Alone, I relished the bird songs, the drone of hushed conversation from neighboring tables, and the gentle lapping of waves sliding on the shore. I didn't feel the passage of time. There was no destination propelling me forward, no past and no future. Each glorious moment was replaced by the next.

~ Marilyn Berman

I was scripting for a series on the Arts programme which was shown very late on a Sunday evening, and I was sent off to get the low down on several up and coming musicians who would be featured each week. To the music world, they may have been up and coming, I would have preferred them to be down and going and preferably out of range.

~ Lucinda E. Clarke

Walk your own path and be yourself

~ Joanne Nussbaum

Some flowers need flames to find their way into this world.

~ Cindy Campopiano

Damoder climbed slowly to his feet. 'Buy lot!' he wheedled, 'I am poor man. I sell you cheap. I am bank-Rupert! Apparently the only things that could save him from bank-rupertcy were our dollars.

~ Frank Kusy

He was lonely. I could see that. He was working his butt off-and mine, too-in the hope that a million rupees might sort out his sex life. I prayed to Buddha he would be successful. If he didn't get some action soon, I doubted I would, either.

~ Frank Kusy

It was one of those striking moments in life where you find familiarity in the inexplicable.

~ Gerry Abbey

And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.

~ Gerry Abbey

I looked out again at the rising moon and I let the weight of my day, my week, lift away with the rushing wind as I was blown into the depths of myself.

~ Gerry Abbey

Somehow, we were passing the boundaries of language and finding clarity in shared thought, even if we were just talking about beer!

~ Gerry Abbey

My professional life had started and here I was at a professional dinner full of uninhibited drinking.

~ Gerry Abbey

There were signs everywhere but none that I could read or even hope to decipher. These multi-lined symbols unhinged my familiar world.

~ Gerry Abbey

As the silence returned, I sat back and felt the tension ease away; I hadn’t even known I was tense. A few moments passed and once again the cycling fan laced in with the clanging chains and mixed with the rumbling mower and the buzzing insects.

~ Gerry Abbey

My meal arrived. It was a bowl of tepid, green curried water with two spinach leaves floating in it. The waiter called it 'vegetable soup'. I called it inedible slop.

~ Frank Kusy

As well as writing, 2004 saw my first attempt at wine making: the elixir of life. Unfortunately, my effort tasted more like the elixir of death.

~ Craig Briggs

After a lifetime of soft, easy living in the West, one's buttocks take an awful hammering out here. Backpacking around India is just one long round of sitting on bone-hard, chafing, bruising and generally uncomfortable seats-whether in buses our trains, or restaurants or cinemas. There is no such thing as a padded seat in the whole country.

~ Frank Kusy

I stood in the library admiring the huge book collection. There was something inherently calming about being surrounded by books, even their smell and texture was comforting.

~ Saffron Mello Castro

And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.

~ Cheryl Strayed

Wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking.

~ Martha Barron Barrett

I want my heart to be the thin place. I don't want to board a plane to feel the kiss of heaven. I want to carry it with me wherever I go. I want my fragile, hurting heart, to recognize fleeting kairos, eternal moments as they pass. I want to be my own mountain and my own retreat.

~ Anna White

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.

~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

In the museums we used to visit on family vacations when I was a kid, I used to love those rooms which displayed collections of minerals in a kind of closet or chamber which would, at the push of a button, darken. Then ultraviolet lights would begin to glow and the minerals would seem to come alive, new colors, new possibilities, and architectures revealed. Plain stones became fantastic, “futuristic…” Of course there wasn’t any black light in the center of the earth, in the caves where they were quarried; how strange that these stones should have to be brought here, bathed with this unnatural light in order for their transcendent characters to emerge. Irradiation revealed a secret aspect of the world.Imagine illness as this light; demanding, torturous, punitive, it nonetheless reveals more of what things are. A certain glow of being appears. I think this is what is meant when we speculate that death is what makes love possible.

~ Mark Doty

Love has no demand of us but to keep practicing, to do the next hard thing. Love says, Come dear. Take the next step.

~ Anna White

Writing about the self to spur intellectual growth or attain a teardrop of emotional salvation is akin to a fish attempting to construct a net that will capture itself.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Talking to oneself is a recognized means to learn, in fact, self-speak may be the seed concept behind human consciousness. Private conversation that we hold with ourselves might represent the preeminent means to provoke the speaker into thinking (a form of cognitive auto-stimulation), modify behavior, and perhaps even amend the functional architecture of the plastic human brain. Writing out our private talks with oneself enables a person to “see” what they think, a process that invites reflection, ongoing thoughtful discourse with the self, and refinement of our thinking patterns and beliefs. Internal sotto voice conversations with our private-self provide several advantages, but most people find it difficult to maintain self-speak for an extended period. Internal dialogue must compete with external distractions. Writing allows a person to resume a personal dialogue where they left off before interrupted by outside stimuli. A written disquisition also provides a permanent record that a person can examine, amend, supplement, update, or reject.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I was promising myself strength.I had to write it, say it, make the effort and fake it before I actually believed I could do it.

~ Aspen Matis

I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

~ Yiyun Li

In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament.

~ Vivian Gornick

Who am I, when all I’ve ever believed myself to be, is fading before my very eyes?Am I still me, or just a shadow of what I used to be?Was I just an illusion that lived only in my head?Did I paint myself as something more than I really am?And with all these changes in my life… What will be left of the woman who dreamed her dreams?When all the colors that she wrapped herself with… are slowly being stripped away…Copyright © Eeva Lancaster

~ Eeva Lancaster

It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.

~ Cheryl Strayed

I no longer needed to peel myself of my skin, or to hide. To Dash the colorless ephemeral things that existed just beneath my surface were as vivid as the beauty marks he traced on my cheek.

~ Aspen Matis

I realized that I was okay with myself. I was quirky and withdrawn and loud, but I liked that. I smiled at strangers without thinking they were going to attack me and drag me into their cars. I went to doctors’ offices and touched magazines that had been touched by sick people.

~ Anna White

Telling our personal story constitutes an act of consciousness that defines the ethical lining of a person’s constitution. Recounting personal stories promotes personal growth, spurs the performance of selfless deeds, and in doing so enhances the ability of the equitable eye of humanity to scroll rearward and forward. Every person must become familiar with our communal history of struggle, loss, redemption, and meaningfully contemplate the meaning behind our personal existence in order to draft a proper and prosperous future for succeeding generations. Accordingly, every person is responsible for sharing their story using the language of thought that best expresses their sanguine reminiscences. Without a record of pastimes, we will never know what were, what we now are, or what we might become by steadfastly and honorably struggling with mortal chores.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I could not feel, smell, see, hear, or taste the world around me. If I had allowed myself to experience these things in all their intensity, I might have lost my mind. If I had allowed myself to cry, I might never have been able to stop. So I survived, but I never felt joy, never felt safe.

~ Yeonmi Park

It takes all my strength to do daily tasks. To some people, I’m just a number. I’m a projected food stamps debit card lifetime member. I’m seen as crazy or insane, but it doesn’t matter. I know I am bigger than my suffering.

~ Jacquelyn Nicole Davis

This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . . to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on. This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . . to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.

~ Oswald Spengler

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.

~ Anna White