Memoir Quotes

A writer is not born but made through study and sheer willpower and ability to embrace beauty and agony.

I don't need to write a memoir of my life. All you need to do is read one of my books. I'm there.

I doubt that anyone has a Damascus moment after experiencing discrimination. Most people seem to have shining moments of change after experiencing grace.

Anyone with an autobiography is almost definitely an evil piece of shit.

Scars are something of a body’s memoir.

I saw for the first time that I could stop giving people the power to make me feel disrespected. In my anger I began to see the absurdity of allowing this boy to shame me.

It's the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim

So this needs to be said, and so I will try to say it

Stories about lives remembered bring us backward while allowing us to move forward.

Sometimes the best way we can serve God is by honouring and taking care of that which has already been give to us. This, is my case, is my children.

It has long been my motto that if you cannot get your act together... then the very least you can do is try to make your act entertaining.

You don’t need extra food, extra water, extra clothing for extra warmth – anything extra. You don’t need soap or deodorant. Everything you carry you should need daily.

You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.

I watch the sky progress through its morning paces, the light turning from rose to saffron as the sun ascends, its rays like ribbons tangling in the tops of trees.

Finally the dawn came, the sky fringed with pink, and the sun bright as a coin in a spill of rising red.

...tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation.... the window rosy with anemic November light.

...the clear water the color of deeply steeped tea, surrounded by cattails and gracile grasses.

A memoir, at its heart, is written in order to figure out who you are.

Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?

I needed him like I needed air to breathe.

I wanted the fairytale.

A journey of the mind – a written vision quest – has only one goal: to interact with the world and attempt to develop the dormant intellectual and spiritual awareness of the author.

He was the one I compared all others to.

It was as if we'd known each other for a thousand years.

My handbag turned into a diaper bag for the chronically ill.

Mine is a gruesome job, but for a scientist with a love for the mechanics of the human body, a great one.

I was taught growing up not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers, to withdraw myself from the sinful 'others'. But we are all others. We are all sinners in someone's eyes.

Never in our silent moments of illusion do we sense the dark parallel that lives next to us. Nor do we suspect the carrier.

Our stories are our best gifts--treasure and share them!

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

Writing is the only way to run away from home, without ever leaving.

Negative self talk costs more than even the richest person can afford. So be nice to yourself whenever possible … and know that it is always possible.

I wanted to know what it felt like to be loved by the man of my dreams.

I had received a t-shirt from my best friend Veronica at my police academy graduation. It reads, ‘Throw your donut in the opposite direction and the cops won’t get you.’ I love wearing that t-shirt.

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

Our biggest dreams always start as a simple thought

The road to the heart is not a long, linear path, but this turning. There is no race or competition, just me and God going deeper, carving a canyon to the soul.

As if violence could make light. Maybe violence could make light.

It was impossible not to fall in love with him.

I’ve heard that sometimes a version of you must die before another more enlightened version can be born. I think that’s true after watching the corpse of myself walk around.

Telling our personal story reveals the shape shifting landscape of our mind.

Anyone who thinks he's too small to make a difference has never been bit by a mosquito", I'd tell people.

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

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

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

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

Chasing angels or fleeing demons, go to the mountains.

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

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

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.