Memoir Quotes

Destiny is not always preordained. Life is about making choices. Our lives are the sum of all the choices we make, the bridges we cross, and the ones we burn. Our souls cast long shadows over many people, even after we are gone. Fate, luck, and providence are the consequence of our freedom of choice, not the determinants. When justice is served by following our principles, making good decisions brings us inner peace.

~ Judith Land

You had nightmares every night for a long time and screamed in Korean words, but we didn't know what they meant. I asked someone who knew Korean, and he said it was um-ma um-ma, the word for mom.

~ Soojung Jo

Not everyone is capable of sacrificing his own life. So it is, always has been and always will be.

~ Tadeusz Pankiewicz

I have learned that I am a better everything because I wanted and loved those babies so much. I am also a better everything because I lost them. Sure, the losses left my heart and soul shattered at first, but now with daily work in recovery I have a scarred but healing heart and soul

~ Justine Brooks Froelker

It is not a crime to commit First Degree Writing

~ Temple Emmet Williams

These two Joes—the nasty bully and the starry-eyed dreamer—were my father. Growing up, the difficulty was knowing just which Joe would rise with the sun that day.

~ Pythia Peay

They departed in the form of white smoke, rose easily upward, waved their hands in parting, and viewed with pity all those who remained behind. Then they danced gaily in celebration of their new freedom, before disintegrating into the air.

~ Joseph Bau

I'm ready for the day when Mom loves me too much to keep me, and for every other person who will someday see that I'm not worth holding on to.

~ Soojung Jo

I don't understand this--when people love you so much they are willing to get rid of you. I think if I loved someone that much I'd want to stay with them. It doesn't make sense that love would make a mother leave, and I wonder when this mother will love me that much too. I get the idea that love might be something to both desire and fear, and maybe if we don't love each other too much I won't have to go away again. I wonder why love works for everyone else, but it doesn't work for me.

~ Soojung Jo

Having a blood family means suddenly revising a definition of family that I have, over many years, learned to accept. How can I hold both concepts in my mind or find room for both families in my heart?

~ Soojung Jo

Running away is vastly underrated.

~ Cara Lopez Lee

Pen and paper have been my life, now they may herald my death. But I asked for these, the traditional tools of my trade, and to my surprise my request has been granted.

~ Susan Leona Fisher

I’d very much like to ‘conclude' something from this experiment. Or that it should raise a question in my mind, and a commitment to get to the bottom of the matter, to investigate, to come up with an outline of the beginning of an answer, however ill-defined or trite it might be . . . But no. I’m here to see, hear, observe - to experience. Let others explain.

~ Jacques Yonnet

The Americans were understandably on hair triggers. There was a good reason for all of this security. For despite TV images of quick victory, much of Baghdad certainly had not fallen and firefights with die-hard Ba’athists loyal to Saddam Hussein were raging all over the city.

~ Lawrence Anthony

The nearest one came to a tumble dryer was if the laundry basket was dropped on the way to the washing-line and then the whole lot went tumbling down the drive.

~ Ann Patras

Romance blossomed over a carrier bag full of mackerel. It wasn't exactly how I imagined it would happen; there were no sunsets, or butterflies, or birdsong, just some smelly dead fish and a slimy carrier bag.

~ Victoria Twead

...I didn't want to be a passenger on someone else's motorcycle.I wanted to be the one riding that motherfucker.

~ Lily Brooks-Dalton

My shipmates and I only grasped our roles on the very superficial level we were taught. We were fighting the bad guys. They were the bad guys because we were told that they were the bad guys. We had to control, infiltrate, and shove our authority around the world because we were its greatest nation. We had the shiniest ships, the biggest guns, the deadliest weapons, and the cockiest egos. And if we thought otherwise, we were vicious traitors. The military condemns rebels, thinkers, and doubt. The military loves obedience, loyalty, and oblivion. Its core values are, after all, “Honor, Courage, and Commitment.

~ Maggie Georgiana Young

Indie authors write, design, sell. Like magic, skip one and you make must read vanish.

~ Temple Emmet Williams

I do not NEED a man. That was an impossible thought when I married John thirty years ago. It was unimaginable even seven years ago. I finally understand why lasting love has eluded me: the relationship I've been searching for all along was with myself.

~ Shary Hauer

But instability like mine needs considerable distance to pass for mere quirkiness.

~ Terri Cheney

Shut your mouth - there's a bus coming.

~ Linda De Quincey

In a world where the most consequential things happen by chance, or from unfathomable causes, you don't look to reason for help. You consort with mysteries... They have been killed in place of you - in your place. You don't think it out, not at the time, not in those terms, but you can't help but feel it, and go on feeling it. It's the close call you have to keep escaping from, the unending doubt that you have a right to your own life. It's the corruption suffered by everyone who lives on, that henceforth they must wonder at the reason and probe its justice.

~ Tobias Wolff

I define success as being the best, authentic me that I can be.

~ Leeky Behrman

It was clear that most of my insecurities originated from my need to have things be “perfect.” I wasn’t sure what bothered me more, the fact that I had no control over the changes of my body and hair or that this horrible situation was only happening to me.

~ Tracey Berkowitz

I’m pretty sure Number 1 wasn’t even aware that he was using a man’s deadliest weapon against women. He exposed his vulnerability. Over the years, I would repeat a pattern of chronically caving to that same behavior. It didn’t matter whether or not I liked or respected him. Every time he dared to let his guard down and unveil some of his ugliest, grittiest faces, I whole-heartedly believed I was the only person on earth being let in on a secret. It was a mirage of a connection. Despite his faults and my prior resistance, I felt an obligation to uphold that bond. No matter what kind of person he was or how toxic he could have been, I saw beauty in that fleeting defenselessness as if he were an infant, innocent and untainted by the evils of the world. I always fell in love with that face in every man. I clutched that memory tightly, despite the fact that its weight wore my arms and drug my pace. I was so focused on remembering their moment of weakness that I was blind to who they normally were.

~ Maggie Georgiana Young

Love is bigger than everything.

~ Reba Riley

Sometimes to move forward, you have to find yourself backwards.

~ Reba Riley

From my first stab at second base, I became obsessively concerned for my vaginal upkeep. I began shaving the day after I felt my first tongue down my throat. The first buzz was a disaster, causing horrifically itchy dull razor breakout that made me look like I made love to a poison ivy bush. Whenever I thought there was a chance of unveiling my privates, I smothered every breakout with the same foundation I used for the occasional teenage acne face breakouts.

~ Maggie Georgiana Young

I considered not getting up, but recognized the pain of staying down was worse than the pain of attempting to stand.

~ Reba Riley

If you are a twin, you watch yourself live two lives–yours and hers. It’s constant comparison. I am never as good as the bad I wanted her to be. I was the only soldier I needed. We couldn’t haven known what splitting would mean. Time speeds past fast, scattering like shrapnel, and is quiet as cobwebs. We wait for the ambush. Sister will find out first; she’ll be my living memory. She will be the body left standing.

~ Christa Parravani

Choose this life. Choose this body. Say yes to all of it. Say yes to the beauty and the good and the ugly and the difficult. Choose what you have, what you are. Choose this moment. Choose to love and remember. You are full. You are alive.

~ Kimber Simpkins

Do your parents know you’re here?' asked the lady at social Services. ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I want to know about children’s homes.’ I had to stand on my toes to see over the reception desk.

~ Constance Briscoe

You kids were all planned, you were just planned really, really quickly.

~ Candace Allan

[V]alue your dreams but . . . be wary of them also, . . . look for integrity in unusual places.

~ Azar Nafisi

I always felt awkward and unfinished, unworthy of love, suspicious of affection offered. My mother's absence became a great presence in my life.

~ Marilyn Sewell

Bonding through caregiving..I don't think I'd ever realized until then that so much affection, so much heart connect, happens when we take care of someone.

~ Lindsey O'connor

This is why being broken is so beautiful: being broken means you have cracks for love and light to shine through, gaps for the Godiverse to burrow and bloom, space to move from who you are to who you will become.

~ Reba Riley

And I was cooking for three, and teaching, and taking care of a man who’d just collapsed in my house; learning to cook like June Cleaver didn’t exactly seem an option.

~ Mark Doty

I try to be perfect but I'm not. I'm perfectly imperfect in every way.

~ James Weston