Memoir Quotes

When I was about nine, my siblings and I fell out of our moving van at an intersection. My dad didn’t notice for about five blocks. It was back before seat belts. It was also back before parents used any sort of common sense whatsoever. It was a time when you didn’t raise your children. You just fed them and they got bigger.

~ Dina Kucera

How do we deal with all the people we’ve been? What happens when we have to confront them?

~ Rachel Kapelke-Dale

Lesson learned: Don’t ever put a guy up on a pedestal. It’s too easy for him to tip over and fall off.

~ Kate Madison

In an attempt to help me move on from my failed marriage, my mom set me up with Jesus Freak. In fact, the stoner hadn’t even finished moving out when she told me not to worry, because she already had someone better lined up for me. I was just lonely and desperate enough to endure a four-month celibate long distance relationship with a guy who read 15 chapters of the Bible and prayed for two hours every day and expected me to follow suit. He wanted to give our hypothetical children Bible names and for us to move to Korea to become missionaries.

~ Kate Madison

I'm often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.

~ Haruki Murakami

Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself.In reality, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.

~ Susanna Kaysen

Each of us is a book waiting to be written, and that book, if written, results in a person explained.

~ Thomas M. Cirignano

I learned in therapy the word No is a complete sentence.

~ Jaycee Dugard

I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me. Ah, yes, let me count your cracks. Let's see, one hundred, two... yes, you'll do nicely. A cracked companion makes me look more whole, gives me something outside myself to care for. When I'm with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks, the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself.

~ Julie Gregory

Chasing angels or fleeing demons, go to the mountains.

~ Jeffrey Rasley

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.

~ Elbert Hubbard

Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.

~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

~ Stephen King

In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.

~ John Grogan

They had buried him under our elm tree, they said -- yet this was not totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.

~ Willie Morris

I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.

~ Marya Hornbacher

Whatever it takes to break your heart and wake you up is grace.

~ Mark Matousek

Your heart is the size of your fist; keep loving, keep fighting.

~ Ariel Gore

In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!

~ Marjane Satrapi

You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.

~ Michael J. Fox

Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free of its gravity, no matter how far I journey.

~ Hyeonseo Lee

You are putting yourself in serious danger...'I think that I preferred to put myself in serious danger rather than confront my shame. My shame at not having become someone, the shame of not having made my parents proud after all the sacrifices they had made for me. The shame of having become a mediocre nihilist.

~ Marjane Satrapi

Fact: upon locking yourself our of your apartment you will immediately need to use the bathroom. Fact: and then you will stand in place and watch your door. You will just stare. As though rebuffed by it. As though it has done this to you.

~ Augusten Burroughs

The greatest challenge of my life has been to see and accept the actual truth without great pain and struggle against it.

~ M.c. Halliday

The morning opens, a mist of innocence appears across the countryside that tells each one of us the day is new. That feeling of hope, love and the humble awareness of our duty becomes clear if even for a moment. It is that experience of inspiration that follows us into a small town woken by a cool frost on this Sunday morning and the laughter of children playing.

~ Kris Courtney

… that sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity and self-intoxicated egomania, that drives poets and writers out of their rooms to seek each other out, to rub shoulders with one another, bully, joke, condescend, feel each other, lay a hand on a shoulder or an arm round a waist, to chat and argue with little nudges, to spy a little, sniff out what is cooking in other pots, flatter, disagree, collude, be right, take offence, apologise, make amends, avoid each other, and seek each other’s company again.

~ Amos Oz

For the first time I realized adults could back themselves into corners so remote that love, or its memory, could no longer reach them.

~ Kirby Wright

You wanted to live inside the lines where the ordinariness of everything would protect you from the dragons that lay at the edge of the map ready to blow fire in your face if you strayed off course, to the edge of the known world.

~ Anne Roiphe

A marriage, willy-nilly, requires you to trust that your spouse will tell your story truthfully and lovingly when you are no longer around to tell it yourself.

~ Kate Braestrup

As an adult, getting paid thousands of dollars a week to say, “Aye, Sir. Course laid in” is a seriously sweet gig, but when I was a teenager, it sucked.

~ Wil Wheaton

God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.

~ Francis Spufford

You know Becky, you haven't been the same since that crowbar fell on your head. - spoken by my mother after I eloped with a guy I'd known for about a month, when I was 18 years old!

~ Becky Lewellen Povich

I like it here. I like the girls, and I like the DJ's, and the cocktail waitresses, and the loud rock'n'roll (though I would happily beat everyone in Poison to death with the severed limbs of the members of Warrant).

~ Craig Machen

We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin.

~ Mary Karr

I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense pretty much.

~ Marya Hornbacher

Oh my!! How you've grown. Soon you'll be catching the Lord's balls.

~ Marjane Satrapi

...if that energy could have been channelled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.

~ Michael Herr

Had I glimpsed just a little of the suffering I would witness and the heartbreak I would endure, I would have fled in the other direction...But I could not foresee any of these things...And many years later, with tears in my eyes, I remembered my decision to follow this God no matter what the cost.

~ Daniel Walker

...I really did choose to be Jim every single day, but that once I put my sword down I haven't chosen Jenny at all; I simply wake up and here I am.

~ Jennifer Finney Boylan

Just because you can, doesn't necessarily mean that you should!

~ Bill Collins