Memoir Quotes - Page 2

Ignore the misery. Custom invites you to ignore the misery."SHOW YOUR TONGUE

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.

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.

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.

It was impossible not to fall in love with him.

Royal Young has accomplished a rare feat in his fresh and riveting debut: he manages to recount his fascinating youth and unconventional family with a mixture of humor, scathing honesty and tenderness. Much more than simply a book about a kid who dreams of stardom, Fame Shark is a thoughtful, hilarious and moving love letter to his family and the Lower East Side of New York City.

This is the only advice I offer you. Pick the small thing, and carry it on. Let it change your life.

I didn’t know what I would do. There was no way I could survive. I stared at my damp tent ceiling, feeling the frigid air against me, the frozen ground against my bottom, so cold my bare skin burned. I needed to get to the next trail-town, Mammoth Lakes. There was no one here to save me now.

Each day has the potential of being your best day. You decide what each day will bring.

I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all autobiographical writers with the same curiosity. What kind of life permits a person the right to become his own subject?

We tried to change Vietnam. Instead, Vietnam changed us.

Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us to little more than animals, humanity in the shape of our saintly medical officers triumphed over barbarism.Remember, while it always seems darkest before the dawn, perseverance pays off and the good times will return.

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.

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.

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

Telling our personal story constitutes an act of consciousness that defines the ethical lining of a person’s constitution. Recounting personal stories promotes personal growth, spurs the performance of selfless deeds, and in doing so enhances the ability of the equitable eye of humanity to scroll rearward and forward. Every person must become familiar with our communal history of struggle, loss, redemption, and meaningfully contemplate the meaning behind our personal existence in order to draft a proper and prosperous future for succeeding generations. Accordingly, every person is responsible for sharing their story using the language of thought that best expresses their sanguine reminiscences. Without a record of pastimes, we will never know what were, what we now are, or what we might become by steadfastly and honorably struggling with mortal chores.

She taught me only how to need to be taken care of. I was here because I needed to learn to take responsibility for making my own decisions — to earn my own trust.

Father, be near as we are surrounded by this cloud of deep suffering. Open our eyes to see that you are all things, the light and the darkness, not only those things that seem good in our eyes, but the horrifying unexplainable. Wrap us up inside of the cloud and reveal the mysteries that can only be learned in places of sorrow, that when we walk out we will be as Moses, transformed by the shadow and beaming with the radiant light of your glory. Give us the strength to love on, though our hearts are broken.

Explore, Experience, Then Push Beyond.

...The more I learned the more I realized how very much one has to know before one is in-the-know at all.

You will touch this joy and you will suddenly know it is what you were looking for your whole life, but you were afraid to even acknowledge the absence because the hunger for it was so encompassing.

It is not a crime to commit First Degree Writing

...I am about eight years old when I first become aware of being other--foreign, outside, separate. Because this lesson comes from my own family, it resonates deeper and truer than playground taunts ever have.

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.

The ordinary stories of our ordinary lives have extraordinary gifts coded within them. . .

I’d begun at the soundless place where California touches Mexico with five Gatorade bottles full of water and eleven pounds of gear and lots of candy. My backpack was tiny, no bigger than a schoolgirl’s knapsack. Everything I carried was everything I had.

After twelve years of trying, I just decided to stop missing.

Is there anything courageous or brave about making the only possible choice that will save your life? When you're drowning, you grab any hand that's offered. To me, bravery is a spontaneous decision to save somebody else's life when your own is in danger.

There was no time to lose, no time to waste in rest or play. The life of the earth comes up with a rush in the springtime.

Every crossroad in life has four options – quit, adapt, proceed, or accept, but quitting is a dead-end.

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

I needed to stop hiding: I was raped. It was time to honestly be exactly who I was. I saw—the shame wasn't mine, it was his, and I could stop misrepresenting myself, and I could accept myself.

A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.

The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity.

No matter what else people may steal from you, they will never be able to take away your knowledge.

I love that there's no cutoff where we get labeled and sent off to a home for hopeless, cranky, depressives. Every day is a new chance to listen longer and be braver and love more. We get to try again and again and again.

I’ve written for those who want to learn, truly learn, about a community with which they aren’t familiar. Or for those who have preconceptions but can admit they may not be entirely accurate (and, in some cases, that they are completely wrong). This means my reader must possess an open mind and a certain level of curiosity. If that’s you, proceed to checkout. An uncensored glimpse behind the curtain, hairy backs and all, awaits.

We write our life stories detailing our worldly experiences in order to expose the unconscious mind to the world of conscious appreciation. By extending our consciousness, we bring material insights to our emotional forefront. Words lay the foundation for truth telling. The music of our words allows us to train the lightness of language upon the darkness of our own humanity. The taxonomy of the human mind empowers us to employ the magic of language to share information, suggest action, speculate upon the future, reminisce about pastimes, lance our most ragged feelings, and pontificate, with a drunkard’s sense of punchy assuredness, upon any topic that fits our fancy. We tell stories in order to mark our existence, to share both our triumphs and failures, and teach wisdom gained from our previous skirmishes in a convoluted world. In absence of our stories, we do not exist in our own minds or in the minds of our people.

oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)

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.

Everything around me affirmed there was nothing else I could do – yet everything inside me cried that I was not doing enough.

The features of character are carved out of adversity.

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

Free love, man, Free Love! Which, by the way, was the single greatest concept a young man has ever heard. About three years late, women got wise an my frustration returned to normal levels.

Every book has to wait for the right time to be read and understood.

He was sprightly and uncommonly good looking, with a quiet, magnanimous confidence that attracted people. He was my hero, too, and I listened to him. He gave me lots of wise advice. He told me to put myself in win-win situations, and that, “You have to know what you want, and you have to get it,

One day in the woods he met an Indian. They stood in the wet, cold woods and looked at each other, and they could not talk because they did not know each other's words.

I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love.

Tomorrow! How sweet its prospects for a drunkard the night before. There is no better word. Before the earth hurls itself into sunshine, nothing is not possible.

All family stories are important, just as all people are important, and they deserve to be passed along.

I no longer needed to peel myself of my skin, or to hide. To Dash the colorless ephemeral things that existed just beneath my surface were as vivid as the beauty marks he traced on my cheek.

death is not a pretty flower that had almost pricked me. It was not a small annoyance I could simply bypass and quickly disregard. It was really The End.

The children we bring into the world are small replicas of ourselves and our husbands; the pride and joy of grandfathers and grandmothers. We dream of being mothers, and for most of us that dreams are realised naturally. For this is the Miracle of Life.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

I used to teach at an abused children's home. I told the kids, "You all have a manure pile of memories. Nothing you can do about that. Now you can drown in the stink or turn it into compost and grow a garden. I wouldn't't be as good a teacher to you if I didn't know what you're going through. That way, I make my memories do good instead of letting them eat me. I'm like Herbie from Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. I pulled my Bumble's teeth. He's still big and scary but he can't bite me anymore.

Joy, it is, which I’ve never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self – delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving.

Storytelling creates a healing serum. The thematic unguent of our personal story represents a fusion of the ineffable truths that each of us must discover within ourselves.

Even sentenced to twenty-five years in prison Ted didn’t get what he deserved. Maybe his prison mates would give it to him.

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

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.