Memoir Quotes

A garden is never finished. In that sense it is like the human world and all human undertakings.

~ Karel Čapek

He clenched his small fist, bellowed his rage to the heavens, and resolved to never again recognize the authority of any man on earth.

~ Patricia Lockwood

We are not defined by what knocks us down - we are defined by how e get back up

~ Madeleine Black

She asks to see my diploma, holds it in her hands and smiles, reads it out loud before handing it back to me, and I hold it tightly on my lap, this piece of paper, the proof they won't find me dead on a couch on my thirty-eighth birthday or in some basement bathtub with my eyes wide and lifeless or alone in the bed I slept in as a child with a Baggie of white powder under my mattress.

~ Kenny Porpora

They say the truth will set you free, but what they neglect to mention is what happens when the truth isn't what you want to hear.

~ Connor Franta

I am not here to make you feel better, I am just here to make you feel worse

~ Courtney Love

We are living in an artificial world—a world of fantasies and illusions. We've learned beautiful phrases but haven't learned yet how to carry out that little bit that we know. Our brains are stuffed with quotations, while at the same time nine out of ten of these dogmas are incomprehensible, murky, or lies. Which are worthwhile and which are not? Yes, I must stop being false before others and myself. How simple it all seems! But how do I do this? Let just a little time pass, and then we may understand—only the simplest, honorable acts determine the value of a man. Only I myself can and must help myself to become an adult.

~ Boris Gorbachevsky

Tomorrow is promised to no one so live your life fully everyday.

~ Therese Crutcher-Marin

I'm just scared I won't run as fast as I did my freshman year,' I admitted, choking back tears.Coach Woj looked at me for a moment, his eye gentle.'You don't have to.

~ Rachael Rose Steil

I held the cardboard and felt its scissor-cut edge. And for the first time I understood the shape of my grief. I could feel exactly how big it was. It was the strangest feeling, like holding something the size of a mountain in my arms. You have to be patient, he had said. If you want to see something very much, you just have to be patient and wait. There was no patience in my waiting, but time had passed all the same, and worked its careful magic. And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love.

~ Helen Macdonald

Even now, I am anxious about the naked thoughts that I have shared. The observations are blisteringly honest and of course they have to be.

~ John Conrad

Writing a personal essay or memoir addresses how a person thinks and behaves in the context of society’s prevailing moral and ethical codes, informal rules, laws, and customs. A self-ethnographer emphasis what he or she considers important regarding how people perceive and categorize the world, their meaning for behavior, how they imagine and explain things, and ascertaining what has meaning for them. Expository writing, a discursive examination of a broad field of subjects, is one method of cohering the dimensions of a person’s emic and etic thoughts and a linked series of memorable events into a unified personal ideology how to live a purposeful life. In cultural anthropology, the emic approach focuses on what people of a local culture think and how they interpret events whereas the etic approach takes a more objective view of how an outsider evaluates the behavior and customs of a culture. Usage of both emic and etic analysis provides the richest description of a cultural or a society in which the personal essayist operates within.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Attempting to express a person’s objective reality and subjective state of mind with the written word is an endless task because writing alters our perception of reality and amends our mental equilibrium.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing the story of their own life allows the author to parse their story into examinable segments while continuing to engage in the act of communion and creation.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

In two months, I think, my college job will end. In two months I will have no office, no college, no salary, no home. Everything will be different. But, I think, everything already is. When Alice dropped down the rabbit-hole into Wonderland she fell so slowly she could take things from the cupboards and bookshelves on the walls, look curiously at the maps and pictures that passed her by. In my three years as a Cambridge Fellow there’d been lectures and libraries and college meetings, supervisions, admissions interviews, late nights of paper-writing and essay-marking, and other things soaked in Cantabrian glamour: eating pheasant by candlelight at High Table while snow dashed itself in flurries against the leaded glass and carols were sung and the port was passed and the silver glittered upon dark-polished refectory tables. Now, standing on a cricket pitch with a hawk on my hand, I knew I had always been falling as I moved past these things. I could reach out and touch them, pick them off their shelves and replace them, but they were not mine. Not really ever mine. Alice, falling, looked down to see where she was headed, but everything below her was darkness.

~ Helen Macdonald

The downside is the fear.The fear of something happening to her, the pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean.I hope you do for your sake.

~ David Mitchell

In the beginning, I only wanted to know, love, and serve God and understand the Bible. What harm could that possibly bring?

~ Charlene L. Edge

July 22, 2009At times I still feel lost, but I also feel the comfort of my Lord through the physical pain and the mental challenges. I know He’s there. I can feel Him in the sun beaming down on my brown skin. It feels like love and comfort. It feels like He’s holding me when I suffer and I’m not alone.

~ Jacquelyn Nicole Davis

The act of writing involves documenting and studiously examining interactions of all aspects of the self, the environment, and culture. Writing is an illustrious act of self-expression. Writing resembles a ‘coming of the age’ story because the ongoing process of defining a person’s personality and character is representative of the synergistic product of the continuous and cumulative interaction of an organic self with the world, the constant process of developing psychological, social, cognitive and ethical self.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

When writing a comprehensive self-investigatory scroll, the writer attempts to weave a network of strands capable of enmeshing all sizes of ideas including those with no obvious interconnection. The writer must also trace all lingering thoughts to their original source in personal experiences, and revaluate each exquisite nuance notched into a person’s conscious mind including acts of depravity, violence, and the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The ride back to Kathmandu was comfortable and relaxing. There were more overturned trucks (the gas-powered ones seem to tip the most often, I’m surprised there weren’t more explosions), goats being herded across the highway by ancient women, children playing games in traffic, private cars and buses alike pulling over in the most inconvenient places for a picnic or public bath, and best of all the suicidal overtaking maneuvers (or what we would call ‘passing’) by our bus and others while going downhill at incredible speeds or around hairpin turns uphill with absolutely no power left to actually get around the other vehicle.

~ Jennifer S. Alderson

There are no answers, only choices.

~ Christine Mason Miller

Even now, every job I get, I worry that it will be my last. I think becoming a washed-up hag is sort of my destiny. So if you see a wrinkled old bitch wearing a tattered fur and chain-smoking in an off-Broadway back alley...that’s just me. Starting four years from now.

~ Anna Kendrick

The shape of your life depends upon whether you choose to be the sculptor or the clay.

~ Pamela M. Covington

We both knew what it was to hurt our bodies. It's a strange reason to bond with someone, but I think we both needed to feel understood, and, even though we couldn't love ourselves, we could love each other.

~ Melissa C. Water

I have referred to it as a gift--something for which others with this affliction have taken me to task. I was only speaking from my own experience, of course, but I stand partially corrected: if it is a gift, it's the gift that just keeps on taking.Coping with relentless assault and the accumulating damage is not easy. Nobody would ever choose to have this visited upon them. Still, this unexpected crisis forced a fundamental life decision: adopt a siege mentality--or embark upon a journey. Whatever it was--courage? acceptance? wisdom?--that finally allowed me to go down the second road (after spending a few disastrous years on the first) was unquestionably a gift--and absent this neurophysiological catastrophe, I would never have opened it, or been so profoundly enriched. That's why I consider myself a lucky man.

~ Michael J. Fox

I know that I'm crazy. And that has made all the difference. From: Furiously Happy: A funny book about horrible things.

~ Jenny Lawson

...A secure future seemed mapped out for me. Too secure, too mapped out. If I carried on in medicine, I realized I'd have a pretty good idea exactly what I'd be doing ten, twenty and even thirty years from that moment. It struck me like a halibut from the North Sea that that was not the way my life should go at all. What was the point of working on through the age of sixty-five and taking a chance on a better reincarnation next time?

~ Graham Chapman

Writers live twice. They go along with their regular life, are as fas as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning. But there's another part of them that they have been training. The one that lives every second at a time. That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it. Looks at the texture and details.

~ Natalie Goldberg

We are spiritual beings having a human experience. We don't choose the experience but we do choose how we react to the experience we have. Choose to be positive, choose to be helpful, choose to be happy.

~ Paula Coffer

William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He’d appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway.

~ Patti Smith

In a funny way it's almost fun, having everything be so fucked up and managing to adjust. I guess you might say I'm proud. Proud of me, proud of my friends for managing to deal with this thing so well. For most people this would be the end of the world. They'd panic, their friends would panic. Things would get trampled in the stampede. But we've kept our heads, made the necessary allowances, ad can just ride this thing out.I'm pretty much just putting in time waiting for this cloud to blow over. Waiting for something to come along to make some sense out of all this. Killing time, waiting for some sort of cavalry to come over the hill. There's really not an awful lot I can do but wait. As long as there's no panic, we can hold out for damn near forever.

~ Mark Vonnegut

Only when we feel the story in each of its moments or places are we able to tell it properly.

~ Elena Ferrante

Always remember that your memoir is never about you. It's about your reader. At it's core, it's about that shared space where we all experience the timeless truths of what it means to be human.

~ Jerry Payne

I think, generally speaking, that children have a knack for picking up curse words. Having said that, my brother and I (although admittedly, it was I who displayed a higher level of fluency) took to cursing like frogs take to jumping. Mind you, we received excellent tutoring along the way.

~ J.p. Sexton

It was October in Pennsylvania and on the first morning the ground was frosted. As I walked to breakfast, some guy yelled out, ‘Thirteen inches in the Poconos.’‘Is that I porn film?’ I asked.

~ George Hodgman

That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand.

~ Christopher Isherwood

Once, when I was about ten, we were approaching the ranch after veering north to look at some pasturage when we saw a small barefoot boy racing along the hot road with terror in his face. My father just managed to stop him. Though incoherent with fear, the boy managed to inform us that his little brother had just drowned in the horse trough. My father grabbed the boy and we went racing up to the farmhouse, where the anguished mother, the drowned child in her arms, was sobbing, crying out in German, and rocking in a rocking chair. Fortunately the boy was not quite dead. My father managed to get him away from his mother long enough to stretch him out on the porch and squeeze the water out of him. In a while the boy began to belch dirty fluids and then to breathe again. The crisis past, we went on home. The graceful German mother brought my father jars of her best sauerkraut for many, many years.

~ Larry Mcmurtry

Writing, too, is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you wrote, it pours out of you. If you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else. You don't only listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck. Listening is receptivity. The deeper you can listen, the better you can write. You can take in the way things are without judgment, and the next day you can write the truth about the way things are....If you can capture the way things are that's all the poetry you ever need.

~ Natalie Goldberg

What crannies of untouched perception can you explore? What autumn was it that moon entered your life? When was it that you picked blueberries at their quintessential moment? How long did you wait for your first true bike? Who were your angels? What are you thinking of? Not thinking of? Writing can give you confidence, can train you to wake up.

~ Natalie Goldberg