Memoir Quotes

Your people understand the forest: how the animals behave, where to find them, and so on. I want something similar—but instead of the forest as a whole, I want to understand dragons. They are not only here, you know; there are dragons in the savannah—” Mekeesawa nodded. “Well, there are more than that, all over the world. They live in the mountains and on the plains and maybe even in the ocean. I want to know them as you know the creatures of this forest.”“But why?” Mekeesawa asked. His eyes were still merry with laughter, but his question was serious. “You don’t live in all those places.”With the amount of time I have spent traveling in my life, one might make the argument that I do live in all those places, if only temporarily. But Mekeesawa’s point was a good one, and not easily dismissed. The Moulish understood the creatures of the Green Hell because their survival depended on it; my survival did not depend on my traveling the globe to find dragons. (Indeed, it has on more than one occasion nearly been detrimental to my life expectancy.) How could I answer him?Thinking back on the matter now, it is possible my only true answer to that question is now in its second volume, with more to come. These memoirs are not only an accounting of my life; they are an accounting *for* it.

~ Marie Brennan

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~ Leni Goodman

I applied at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard after my band broke up. I really wanted to work there because it involved the love of my life, music. It was also located on the world famous Sunset Strip, a place I dreamed of going to ever since I was a teenager in the 80's to become a rock star.

~ K.d. Sanders

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention...

~ Wallace Stegner

This body needs me to say yes to it, just as it is right now. No more singing that same old jingle of body-shame and dieter's promised lands.

~ Kimber Simpkins

In late 1949, at two and a half years old, I arrived in Jamaica for the first time. I had crossed the Atlantic by air from England. My Jamaican father was studying in London, my European mother was sick, and so in true Jamaican style I was sent home to my grandparents.

~ Rachel Manley

Going to the seaside in winter is like seeing your partner first thing in the morning. Ugly, depressing and troubled by wind.

~ Andy Leeks

You can only move if you are actually in the moment. You have to be where you are to get where you need to go.

~ Amy Poehler

Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.

~ Frances Mayes

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world's and the psyche's hinterland.

~ C.g. Jung

I read somewhere that a man should tell the story of his life at the age of forty, and this deadline is fast approaching as I write these lines, only a few short weeks remain before this ominous birthday arrives.

~ Juan Gabriel Vásquez

I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. Evenings, I light the old lamps. There is no running water, and I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!

~ C.g. Jung

These secrets are not secrets per se but are truths hidden from public view. I had to write this book. There had to be a reason I survived to tell this story.

~ Rebecca Allard

We cannot honor those we have lost if we lose our minds. - Charmainism

~ Charmaine Smith Ladd

I had lots of appointments, many places to go, and I needed a lot of rest; the art of constructively selling oneself requires much tender self-care

~ Aphrodite Phoenix

First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert's been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her, I'm jumping on the canopied bed while she cries, she's pulling out drawers looking for a handkerchief, Now, he's all right, the man say, they think, patting her shoulder, I'm jumping higher, I'm not allowed, they think he saved old man Mayes, the bed slats dislodge and the mattress collapses. My mother lunges for me.Many traveled to Reidsville for the event, but my family did not witness Willis Barnes's electrocution, From kindergarten through high school, Donette, the murderer's daughter, was in my class. We played together at recess. Sometimes she'd spit on me.

~ Frances Mayes

How many humans over thousands of years have stood thus with their horses, seeing in them the lines of universal perfection, the majesty of grace and power, feeling stronger and more beautiful themselves for their contact with the magical power of such a steed? Such is the lure of the horse. In a world in which grace is neither synonymous nor usually compatible with power, the horse has remained an ancient symbol of strength and elegance, an icon of a majestic essence that exists far outside mere human beings. Because of the space that lies between us — only the cruelest amongst us ever truly conquers a horse — there is magic. “ — Margot Page

~ Margot Page

Interns, unite: you have nothing to lose but your unpaid positions!

~ Piccolo Fortunato

How could she have gotten herself here? To this place where she stood by while the man she adored checked out things to share with his wife? You knew what you were getting into. But that wasn’t really true. One never knew, not entirely, not until in really deep. She screamed and seethed in raw silence. Damien came in then, and spooned her. He hadn’t a clue she was an impulse away from getting up, dressing, and leaving. How shocked he would be, if she did that. And he’d conclude that she wasn’t the well-matched true lover that he thought he had finally, at long last, discovered. That thought ploughed a spike deeply through her. It gouged her so much that her breath stopped. It hurt her even more than did the wife. And she knew in that moment while he settled into bliss that she wasn’t going to leave, that leaving hadn’t had the slightest chance.

~ Aphrodite Phoenix

You won’t be able to do this ten years from now—just leave everything behind and go.

~ Rachel Kapelke-Dale

It's only natural for people to fall, but there are people who, even if they fall, jump right back up right away and run forward, and there are people who just keep sitting there, crying.

~ Ilchi Lee

The move away from writing poetry was gradual. It was a gentle slope into a muddy pond; it was a collection of choices. There was no one thing that took the pen from my hand. Life got in the way. Poetry was an elective. I elected to let it slip into the water. I elected to let my inner poet slide into that deep water and float there a long time, until at last I could no longer see her there drowning.-Nearly Orthodox

~ Angela Doll Carlson

Gentleness is given to those who have learned that God will not have his kingdom triumph through the violence of the world, for such a triumph came through the meekness of a cross.

~ Stanley Hauerwas

Within that quiet little girl with no apparent needs lived a person with a great imagination. In that shell I lived and grew and planned, until there emerged a way to pull all the loose threads of my life together.

~ A.r. Cecil

The vicar's handshake was warm and reassuring, but shaking hands with Mavis was like clutching a bunch of dead twigs.

~ Victoria Twead

This book tells my story. I’m writing it in Ireland, in a house on a hillside. The house sits low in the landscape between a holy well and the site of an Iron Age dwelling. It was built of stones ploughed out of the fields by men who knew how to raise them with their hands and to lock one stone to the next so each was firm. It’s a lone house on the foothills of the last mountain on the Dingle peninsula, the westernmost point in mainland Europe. At night the sky curves above it like a dark bowl, studded with stars.…From the moment I crossed the mountain, I fell in love with the place, which was more beautiful than any I’d ever seen. And with a way of looking at life that was deeper, richer, and wiser than any I’d known before.

~ Felicity Hayes-Mccoy

Everyone has a colorful life. You just have to get out your crayons.

~ Benay Nordby

We had never eaten our own chickens but we delighted in eating their eggs. No matter how hot the summer became, they always presented us with eggs, which I thought was very generous of them, considering the heat. I'm sure I wouldn't have bothered.

~ Victoria Twead

One thing I always admired about Daddy was the way he could bounce back from adversity. From the very beginning of his life, he’d had more than his share of broken dreams and disappointments. He lived through the Depression, a war, a couple of failed businesses and the deaths of two wives, but he always found a way to pick up the pieces and go on. When I’ve hit low points in my own life, I could hear his voice in the back of head saying, “Baby, you’ve got to roll with the punches.

~ L.k. Campbell

Have I mentioned the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, and the collapse of a section of the Bay Bridge, or the Oakland ‘firestorm’ of 1991? No need. There are already there, in my narratives that fail to mention them, in my dreams that fail to represent them.

~ Robert Appelbaum

From one end to the other I have identified with various forms of spirituality. I was a Jew, then a God-hater. I was an atheist, then a Christian, for which I was called a traitor.

~ April Voytko Kempler

Not to put too fine a point on it, if you want the dream, if you want to sculpt the magic inside your head and heart for real, if you want the recognition, if you want your true identity to be glowing, taking charge and fueling the electricity of life, instead of being stuck and feeling bad. If that’s what you want, you have to let go. By which I mean bolt crop the chains of old – and THAT was by far the hardest thing I’ve done.

~ Annaliese Morgan

We human beings are at once delicate and intricate and temporal like the tulips in an April field and sturdy, resilient and enduring as Mt. Rainier when the will inspires us. We are individual miracles, those who live in vegetative states and those who wait with them

~ Benay Nordby

Let us call the world to come together – every child, every woman and every man. Letus draw a bigger picture, one that enters every home, every heart and brings togetherevery voice.Let us listen to the helpless cries of the abused and neglected children. Let us listenmore deeply to women who are being abused, blamed and discriminated against, whiletrapped in cages of injustice, fear and shame, with no option but to suffer in silence.I have seen with my own eyes the happiest dreams of unfortunate victims change totheir worst nightmares. I have seen their lives shatter while their families fall apart.Their hearts have burned and their eyes have seen nothing but misery.Let us transform all the voices and sounds of hopelessness into a beautiful melody thatplays to the world. No matter how dark things get, the sun of justice will eventually rise.The birds will sing our stories to the world. Rainbows will dazzle with color in a skythat is no longer grey.

~ Maha Al Fahim

Yet you stand, too ashamed to run, too fearful to embrace. God I see so much ofwhat I love in that face.

~ Suenammi Richards

I journeyed alone for almost ten years before I found home. Adoptions are like very delicate gardening with transplants and grafts. Mine took hold, rooted, and bloomed, even though there were inevitable adjustments to the new soil and climate. Yet I have not forgotten where my roots started.

~ Ashley Rhodes-Courter

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

The purpose of my life is not to get what I want. The purpose of my life is to become who I am.

~ Cara Lopez Lee

Hey everyone. This is Elizabeth Stone, the one who wrote a A BOY I ONCE KNEW and BLACK SHEEP AND KISSING COUSINS. To those of you who read either one, thanks! But another Elizabeth Stone, not me, wrote WOMEN AND THE CUBAN REVOLUTION and VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. Just setting the record straight!

~ Elizabeth Stone

A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things—how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver—and this inability enhanced my oppression.

~ Vladimir Nabokov