Memoir Quotes

I saw for the first time that I could stop giving people the power to make me feel disrespected. In my anger I began to see the absurdity of allowing this boy to shame me.

~ Aspen Matis

It's the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim

~ Jason Najum

So this needs to be said, and so I will try to say it

~ Jason Najum

The womb of the world births us. My filth comes from the same earthwork that gives rise to all stories. My interior light connects me with all the other creatures that inhabit this world of rocks, air, grass, woods, and water. My genetic code links me inextricably with all of nature. I enter the medley in the river of life with the ability to respond as life unfolds before my childlike eyes. My homemade medicinal poultice might not be of any benefit to other people. Nonetheless, we should each write our stories because each of us aims to attain a greater degree of awareness of our own authenticity. We owe a moral obligation to our family, friends, and ourselves as well as to the community to make a determined effort to wring the most out of life. We must applaud all efforts to investigate the human condition. Even if my writing amounts to nothing more than a clumsy attempt to travel the same tracks other people burnished with much more insight, clarity, precision, and style, it is an act of self-definition to ascribe to any philosophy. Philosophy represents a living charter; it is a life of action.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

And look at all I've accumulated---a house! piles of clothing! two children! an ex-husband! books! boxes of letters! dishes! tiny shampoos from fancy hotels! vases! canned goods! jewelry! computers! acres of old journals! couches! bedsteads! toys galore! stuffed animals! and heaps of memories like wet rags, bunches of them, hanging off me, weighing me down.

~ Martha Tod Dudman

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as petite and unopinionated. My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes short and bossy.

~ Julian Barnes

Stories about lives remembered bring us backward while allowing us to move forward.

~ Nina Sankovitch

Darkness fell, revealing a sparkling night sky so beautiful that we decided to sleep out under the stars. At gray dawn, Phyllis woke me with an urgent voice. “Bill, Bill,” she said, “when I woke up I saw this huge boulder beside me, but it wasn’t there last night. Look! Look!” she said and pointed next to her. It was the huge buffalo bull! He had come back during the night and lay down beside us to sleep. I was awestruck. I felt so honored, so grateful, so loved. I loved that buffalo with all my heart and soul. I felt like he knew it, and that was why he had come back to sleep with us. But maybe there’s a different reason. Judith Niles, a wise spiritual friend of mine recently told me that the spontaneous melody is “the voice of the soul.” The minute she said it I knew she was right. Now I feel sure that the creatures responded to “the voice of the soul” amplified through my body. When we human beings finally get it together the natural world is going to respond to us in more wonderful ways than we can ever begin to imagine.

~ William Billy Packer

Sometimes the best way we can serve God is by honouring and taking care of that which has already been give to us. This, is my case, is my children.

~ Cheryl B. Evans

I go to all the appointments. All the meetings. I sit with the team of inclusion teachers, occupational therapists, doctors, social workers, remedial teachers, and the cab driver that gets him from appointment to appointment, and I push for everything that can be done for my autistic boy. But I will never have a plan that will fix him. Noah is not something to be fixed. And our life will never be normal. And people always say, oh well what’s normal, there’s no such thing really, and I say — sure there is…there’s a spectrum… and there’s lots and lots of possibilities within that spectrum, and trust me buddy, ducks on the moon ain’t one of them….but ….In this abnormal life, I get to live with a pirate, and a bird fancier, and an ogre, and a hedgehog, and many many superheroes, and aliens and monsters — and an angel. I get to go to infinity and beyond.

~ Kelley Jo Burke

The first night in the hospital with a snuffling baby girl, I learned that my family was not the only thing that had expanded. There was now a whole new world of opportunities for judgment and self-doubt.

~ Anna White

It has long been my motto that if you cannot get your act together... then the very least you can do is try to make your act entertaining.

~ Becky Johnson

Back at the Davydokovo apartment, we sat mesmerized in front of Grandad's Avantgard brand TV. It was all porn all the time. Porn in three flavors: 1)Tits and asses; 2) gruesome close-ups of dead bodies from war or crimes; 3) Stalin. Wave upon wave of previously unseen documentary footage of the Generalissimo. Of all the porn, number three was the most lurid. The erotics of power.

~ Anya Von Bremzen

You don’t need extra food, extra water, extra clothing for extra warmth – anything extra. You don’t need soap or deodorant. Everything you carry you should need daily.

~ Aspen Matis

What is this food in my head, anyway? Let’s see...it’s green and good for you and so delicious. It’s prepared by angels with love. The minute you bite into it, it’s savory, chewy, nourishing, and whole- some. You feel instantly revitalized. A small, tiny amount, just a few bites, rejuvenates every cell, deepens your breath, clears your mind, heals your wounds, and mends your heart. It’s made from joyous plants that voluntarily separate themselves from their stalks, laying themselves at the feet of the approaching gardener who gathers them. They eagerly offer their vital energies to nourish living spirits. The angels in their chef hats, singing mantras, cook it tenderly to retain all the benefits of the generous plants. It’s barely sweet, barely salty, and contains all the freshness of spring herbs, summer fruit, spreading leaves, and burgeoning seeds. It comes premade in bags or boxes...you just open it up, sit down, and enjoy. It’s a full meal, enough maybe for a whole day, maybe for a week, maybe for your family, maybe for your friends and neighbors. It multiplies like loaves and fishes, in little biodegradable containers that vaporize instantly the moment you finish them, without any greenhouse emissions. Nothing to clean up!

~ Kimber Simpkins

You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.

~ China Miéville

I watch the sky progress through its morning paces, the light turning from rose to saffron as the sun ascends, its rays like ribbons tangling in the tops of trees.

~ Lauren Slater

Finally the dawn came, the sky fringed with pink, and the sun bright as a coin in a spill of rising red.

~ Lauren Slater

...tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation.... the window rosy with anemic November light.

~ Lauren Slater

...the clear water the color of deeply steeped tea, surrounded by cattails and gracile grasses.

~ Lauren Slater

I looked up skin in the encyclopedia and confirmed that, sure enough, it is the human body's largest organ, a fact that suggests our surfaces are critical to who we are, not just the gateway to physical or spiritual depths but a profoundly important web of cells that, in protecting us, gives us form and function.

~ Lauren Slater

I never said to myself, I am longing; that feeling lived at a level below language.

~ Lauren Slater

They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking, their heads lolling with dizzy delight, rivulets etched into our earth, showing us which way the rain ran, downhill, of course, heading, all water, straight for our yet-to-be-pond.

~ Lauren Slater

A memoir, at its heart, is written in order to figure out who you are.

~ Sean Wilsey

Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?

~ Slash Coleman

I needed him like I needed air to breathe.

~ C.j. English

I wanted the fairytale.

~ C.j. English

A journey of the mind – a written vision quest – has only one goal: to interact with the world and attempt to develop the dormant intellectual and spiritual awareness of the author.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

He was the one I compared all others to.

~ C.j. English

It was as if we'd known each other for a thousand years.

~ C.j. English

I can't say for sure if I'm better off, since I have no way of knowing what would have been. I could have traveled to exotic places and kissed exotic men in the moonlight. Or I could have ended living alone in a dumpy apartment with the flesh eating virus I contracted from a public toilet. Could haves are always a great unknown.

~ Anna White

An author’s operating charter is to unearth embedded symbols that reflect complementary and inconsistent relationships of our collective assemblage, combine harmonizing and contradictory conceptions that motivate us, and delve larger truths out of variable and erratic elements of human nature.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

My handbag turned into a diaper bag for the chronically ill.

~ Tracey Berkowitz

Mine is a gruesome job, but for a scientist with a love for the mechanics of the human body, a great one.

~ Judy Melinek

I was taught growing up not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers, to withdraw myself from the sinful 'others'. But we are all others. We are all sinners in someone's eyes.

~ Anna White

Never in our silent moments of illusion do we sense the dark parallel that lives next to us. Nor do we suspect the carrier.

~ Kris Courtney

Sex is Not Love

~ Lizelle Duplessis

What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think—the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn’t known. Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie’s rim as you climbed its cliffs. And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another. Knowledge wasn’t a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being—whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars.

~ Annie Dillard

Storytelling is an ancient art. The lucent vibes of stories express what we cannot articulate directly. When we hear someone’s story, we respond to the spark of humanness within ourselves that seeks to come out in the light and greet the world. When we tell the stories of our lives, we give voice to people bereft of speech, we make the persons whom we love or loved immortal, and we pass along our familiarity with the natural and physical world.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The story of what it means to be human is never complete. Every generation will produce its own share of comedies and tragedies, fools and geniuses. What the Greeks started the rest of the world will continue to build upon. The old stories will continue to explicate where we came from, while the new stories will illuminate in what direction humankind trends. The collection of future stories of humanity will add to the cumulative library of stories that past writers told, an anthology of collaborative stories will shed light upon the singleness of the human spirit in its aspirations, powers, vicissitudes, and wisdom.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster