Quotes by Memoirists - Page 5

Oh! To live alone, always alone, in the midst of the crowd that surrounds me, without a word of love ever coming to gladden my soul, without a friendly hand reaching out to me!
Herculine Barbin
The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead.
Mary Karr
I learned about women -- how we are made into the women we've become, how we shape ourselves, how we shape each other.
Aminatta Forna
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.
Anne Roiphe
Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night.
Cheryl Strayed
It is time I came back to my real lifeAfter this voyage to an island with no name,Where I lay down at sunrise drunk with light.
May Sarton
My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger.
Cheryl Strayed
Adrian's tone suggested that the desire for something was all it took. They all live with endless possibilities, leave their homes for the sake of something new. But the dream is woven from the fabric of freedom. For desire to exist it requires the element of possibility, and that for Kai has never existed, until now...
Aminatta Forna
My boyfriends have all been as stoical as queen's guards. They'd been patient, committed, and dispassionate, and I'd had to really debase myself to extract any emotion, either grin or grimace, from them.
Koren Zailckas
Bad things are gonna' happen to you, because they happen to us all. And worrying won't stave the really bad things off. Don't make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other people's blow-dried outsides. Even the most privileged person in this stadium suffers the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human.
Mary Karr
To tell a story is to take power over it.
Mark Doty
May you hear my feeble voice! It will tell you that here below there is a heart full of the memory of you.
Herculine Barbin
It's not rocking the boat, Dad. It's called communication. You're allowed to ask questions. Other people do it all the time. Other people don't live in fear of someone else's reactions. They don't relentlessly stress out about getting into trouble.
Koren Zailckas
He was the most ordinary man in all the world, and yet in her memory he'd become luminous, like the prince in a fairy tale.
Cheryl Strayed
I can tell you that solitudeIs not all exaltation, inner spaceWhere the soul breaths and work can be done.Solitude exposes the nerve,Raises up ghosts.The past, never at rest, flows through it.
May Sarton
You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don't have to justif your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you've got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all.
Cheryl Strayed
In the museums we used to visit on family vacations when I was a kid, I used to love those rooms which displayed collections of minerals in a kind of closet or chamber which would, at the push of a button, darken. Then ultraviolet lights would begin to glow and the minerals would seem to come alive, new colors, new possibilities, and architectures revealed. Plain stones became fantastic, “futuristic…” Of course there wasn’t any black light in the center of the earth, in the caves where they were quarried; how strange that these stones should have to be brought here, bathed with this unnatural light in order for their transcendent characters to emerge. Irradiation revealed a secret aspect of the world.Imagine illness as this light; demanding, torturous, punitive, it nonetheless reveals more of what things are. A certain glow of being appears. I think this is what is meant when we speculate that death is what makes love possible.
Mark Doty
I think it's neat you do what you want. Not enough chicks do that, if you ask me--just tell society and their expectations to go fuck themselves. If more women did that, we'd be better off.
Cheryl Strayed
To us, they are not so much who they are as who they will become.
Cheryl Strayed
Within forty minutes, the voice inside my head was screaming, WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO? I tried to ignore it, to hum as I hiked, though humming proved too difficult to do while also panting and moaning in agony and trying to remain hunched in that remotely upright position while also propelling myself forward when I felt like a building with legs.
Cheryl Strayed
The sky didn't wonder where it was.
Cheryl Strayed
Most people have to talk so they won't hear.
May Sarton
The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.
May Sarton
I'd never had a mind for math. ... It was a logic that made little sense to me. In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation. It was a story.
Cheryl Strayed
What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.
Aminatta Forna
Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.
May Sarton
What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?
Mark Doty
He kissed me hard and I kissed him back harder, like it was the end of an era that had lasted all of my life.
Cheryl Strayed
I'd learned myself by the age of sixteen that just as girls guarded their virginity, boys guarded something less tangible which they called Themselves.
Joyce Johnson
it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.
Mary Karr
Ordinarily my mom just sunk deeper into her corner of the couch and ignored it. She had succesfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us. If I had to guess the number of books she read during that time, I would place the number at somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand.
Haven Kimmel
I'm trying to figure out precisely which character flaw might be responsible for my latest life failure.
Koren Zailckas
Mother’s particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.
Mary Karr
…I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn’t seem to suffice, not really—rather’s it that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into it’s brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.
Mark Doty
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
May Sarton
You wrote in a poem, “I love your body,” as if love was for you embodied in the senses, and yet more than the senses together, an enveloping sense itself sensuous, as if all the body made sense.
David Plante
I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharp's Sunday school. How he sort of learned to lean into feeling hurt at the end, the way you might lean into a heavy wind that almost winds up supporting you after a while.
Mary Karr
I once heard someone say that the concept of moderation seems a little extreme, and tonight...I agree.
Koren Zailckas
... In your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole. Also, because it's harder to be magnanimous when you're in your twenties, I think, and so that's why I'd like to remind you of it. You're generally less humble in that decade than you'll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and uncertainty and fear. You will learn a lot about yourself if you stretch in the direction of goodness, of bigness, of kindness, of forgiveness, of emotional bravery.
Cheryl Strayed
If we didn't read people who were bastards, we'd never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
Mary Karr
A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
Mary Karr
I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked. Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away. I simply did not let myself become afraid. Fear begets fear. Power begets Power. I willed myself to beget power. And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid.
Cheryl Strayed
Be fearless enough to let love transform you.
Cheryl Strayed
None of us understood that the body is a connected thing.
Lucy Grealy
What can I do but stand with my mouth open, no sound emerging? My lips move and I wave my arms making gestures from the other side of the glass, which I can’t penetrate.…people can speak out of anything, though the struggle takes years. The problem is, whatever I say about the present feels false-nothing contains it all, or catches the depth of things, or their terrible one-dimensionality.What am I living on? Someone said the other day, “that old irrepressible-impossible- hope.” And I thought no, this doesn’t feel like hope. But maybe that’s what hope is, no shining thing but a kind of sustenance, plain as bread, the ordinary thing that feeds us. How could we confuse this optimism, when it has nothing to do with expecting things to get better?Hope has to do with continuing, that’s all…I can imagine now, where I couldn’t before, this long erosion of faith, this steady drawing from one’s strength, until what’s left is tenuous, transparent.
Mark Doty
Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
May Sarton
You can, for just a moment, fuse grief like a bone, but the memory of the ability to bend lingers inside, like an itch running in the blood, just beneath the skin: relief is always only temporary. Grief, we understood, would now hijack a part of our day for the rest of our lives, sneaking in, making the world momentarily stop, every day, forever.
Emily Rapp
Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.
May Sarton
What kind of good deeds? Like Girl Scouts? Because I got kicked out of Brownies and they won't give me another chance to keep my clothes on at camp.
Haven Kimmel
God is usually on the side of big squadrons and against little ones.
Roger de Bussy-Rabutin
My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.
Cheryl Strayed
We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin.
Mary Karr
When it was dark, you always carried the sun in your hand for me.
Seán O'Casey
You are to be pitied more than I, perhaps. I soar above all your innumerable miseries, partaking of the nature of the angels; for, as you have said, my place is not in your narrow sphere. You have the earth, I have boundless space. Enchained here below by the thousand bonds of your gross, material senses, your spirits cannot plunge into that limpid Ocean of the infinite, where, lost for a day upon your arid shores, my soul drinks deep.
Herculine Barbin
Grief doesn't have a face.
Cheryl Strayed
God is not a granter of wishes. God is a ruthless bitch.
Cheryl Strayed
I was a terrible believer in things,but I was also a terrible nonbeliever in things. I was as searching as I was skeptical. I didn't know where to put my faith,or if there was such a place,or even what the word faith meant, in all of it's complexity. Everything seemed to be possibly potent and possibly fake.
Cheryl Strayed
It's meant I will act like less of an asshole, but feel much more like one.
Koren Zailckas
I used to think that once you really knew a thing, its truth would shine on forever. Now it's pretty obvious to me that more often than not the batteries fade, and sometimes what you knew even goes out with a bang when you try and call on it, just like a light bulb cracking off when you throw the switch.
Lucy Grealy
Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
May Sarton