Memoir Quotes - Page 11

But I couldn’t say any of this yet. No one answer felt it could contain anything close to the truth about her. My thoughts of my mother were wild chaos, I didn’t know how to tell him we’d been enmeshed for as long as I could remember.

My path, beyond doubt or denial. I just hadn’t looked toward it. I wasn’t lost. I’d always known the way. If I’d only allowed myself to look. I had never been lost, only scared.

Writing places a person in the community of those imaginative spirits whom preceded their birth. Writing also connects a person with the intrepid spirits whom share the present as well as with those souls whom are not yet born.

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

We must carefully cultivate the voice that speaks to us because an internal voice is the ultimate narrator of our charming and delightful personal story or the documentarian of our tragic and disgraceful plotlines. Stories that we tell ourselves become our functional reality, which format structures the concourse of the nested emotional control panel that guides and girds us through the din of the present.

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.

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

My shipmates and I only grasped our roles on the very superficial level we were taught. We were fighting the bad guys. They were the bad guys because we were told that they were the bad guys. We had to control, infiltrate, and shove our authority around the world because we were its greatest nation. We had the shiniest ships, the biggest guns, the deadliest weapons, and the cockiest egos. And if we thought otherwise, we were vicious traitors. The military condemns rebels, thinkers, and doubt. The military loves obedience, loyalty, and oblivion. Its core values are, after all, “Honor, Courage, and Commitment.

This is hell, but I planned it. I sawed it,I nailed it, and I will live in it until it kills me.I can nail my left palm to the left-hand crosspiece butI can’t do everything myself. I need a hand to nail the right,a help, a love, a you, a wife.

It was heartbreaking to realize how we can fail the people we most love without even trying.

Most memoirs about alcoholism, promiscuity, and addiction are deep, sobering tales full of scars that will never heal and include alarming statistics and reflection about recovery.This is not one of those memoirs.

I go to all the appointments. All the meetings. I sit with the team of inclusion teachers, occupational therapists, doctors, social workers, remedial teachers, and the cab driver that gets him from appointment to appointment, and I push for everything that can be done for my autistic boy. But I will never have a plan that will fix him. Noah is not something to be fixed. And our life will never be normal. And people always say, oh well what’s normal, there’s no such thing really, and I say — sure there is…there’s a spectrum… and there’s lots and lots of possibilities within that spectrum, and trust me buddy, ducks on the moon ain’t one of them….but ….In this abnormal life, I get to live with a pirate, and a bird fancier, and an ogre, and a hedgehog, and many many superheroes, and aliens and monsters — and an angel. I get to go to infinity and beyond.

I knew that I was the least-loved child because I was a girl and because my mother had died giving birth to me.

We had come from lecture halls, school desks and factory workbenches, and over the brief weeks of training, we had bonded together into one large and enthusiastic group. Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war.

Reading wasn't an attempt to educate myself. It was my chief escape from a world that, although gorgeous in landscape and rich with mountain culture, didn't provide what I needed—the promise of adventure, a life beyond the perimeter of hills. I often fantasized that I'd been adopted and had mysterious powers such as flying or teleportation. Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish. Within the pages of a novel, I was unafraid: of my father, of dogs, snakes, and the bully across the creek; of older boys who drove hot rods close enough to make me jump in the ditch; of armed men parked near the bootlegger.

Answering the question 'How would you like to smell?' by saying 'I'd rather I didn't' is also no longer acceptable. It's not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic pot too - it's seen as almost un-feminist not to. What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations - millennia - to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone.

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.

Sometimes I feel she hasn't left...especially when I wear the photo charm necklace with her picture in it. I can't tell you how many young men have stared into that picture and the reaction is always the same: a slow beam rises across their faces and they want to know all about her. They become entranced the way Dana Andrews did when he first saw Gene Tierney's portrait in "Laura." I know Maria finds all of this quite amusing; why shouldn't she? 'Laura' is her middle name.

My mother taught me that an important word in any language is while. while one thing is happening so is another. While someone is in darkness another is in daylight.While person dies another is born.

Everyone's a knucklehead at one point or another.

Men ought to be a four-letter word! Menn!

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.

When facing a decision that stands a 50/50 chance of being correct, the choice made will be wrong 80% of the time. Rick Coxen

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.

By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from...

They that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue something that might be of value, some element of truth and hope and usefulness, from the smashing up of my own youth by the war.

Write them all down. The mistakes and the blessings and the places you cracked in two. Write the prayers and the tantrums. The sacred and the profane. The open roads and the closed doors. Nothing is permanent.

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.

The world is full of broken people who think they are surrounded by whole people.

It was impossible not to fall in love with him.

I’m chasing after that Holy Shit effect.If this sounds arrogant, that’s because it is. If you don’t believe in your own greatness, no one else will. You’re limited only by your doubts, your fears, and your desire to fit in rather than stand out.And there’s room in this world for all of us to stand out.

Bonding through caregiving..I don't think I'd ever realized until then that so much affection, so much heart connect, happens when we take care of someone.

The point, I decided, wasn't to have the autobiography or even the memories. The point was who I became when I wrote.

I was able to pitch a tent and carry a backpack twenty-five miles a day through mountains—I’d mastered a thousand amazing physical feats—physically I’d become undeniably confident and capable—but physical weakness had never been the problem that I had. My true problem had been passivity, the lifelong-conditioned submission that became my nature.

This is why being broken is so beautiful: being broken means you have cracks for love and light to shine through, gaps for the Godiverse to burrow and bloom, space to move from who you are to who you will become.

It was as if hell itself had taken human form and come up from the abyss.

We must define a story which encourages us to make use of the place where we live without killing it, and we must understand that the living world cannot be replicated.

She [Mary Maclane] is almost always referred to as “confessional.” She has been referred to, several times, as the first blogger. Whereas her writing does not confess much - it is much more spiritual memoir than anything, or perhaps something akin to a mystic’s courtly love, directed at the self. I am wondering what distinguishes writing as confessional…I keep on feeling I prefer the latter-day MacLane, the diary she wrote while convalescing from scarlet fever back home in Butte, Montana, I, Mary MacLane, that Melville House is only publishing as an ebook. Mary MacLane melancholy, totally isolated. Feeling intense disquiet. Now in her early thirties, meditating on her whirlwind celebrity, in cities, feeling distanced from all that, but longing for it too. Obsessed with the Mary MacLane who stopped writing, or stopped publishing books, who was involved with the anarchist/bohemian crowd in Chicago, with the Dill Pickle, who died in poverty and obscurity on the South Side at the age of 48. I want to write about her, but I don’t know how or why yet.

If you are a twin, you watch yourself live two lives–yours and hers. It’s constant comparison. I am never as good as the bad I wanted her to be. I was the only soldier I needed. We couldn’t haven known what splitting would mean. Time speeds past fast, scattering like shrapnel, and is quiet as cobwebs. We wait for the ambush. Sister will find out first; she’ll be my living memory. She will be the body left standing.

In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody’s memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory, some memories are lost by the passage of time, psychological defense mechanisms screen other memories from detection, the ephemeral character of other memories are invariably to elusive to arrest with reciprocal language.

Darkness fell, revealing a sparkling night sky so beautiful that we decided to sleep out under the stars. At gray dawn, Phyllis woke me with an urgent voice. “Bill, Bill,” she said, “when I woke up I saw this huge boulder beside me, but it wasn’t there last night. Look! Look!” she said and pointed next to her. It was the huge buffalo bull! He had come back during the night and lay down beside us to sleep. I was awestruck. I felt so honored, so grateful, so loved. I loved that buffalo with all my heart and soul. I felt like he knew it, and that was why he had come back to sleep with us. But maybe there’s a different reason. Judith Niles, a wise spiritual friend of mine recently told me that the spontaneous melody is “the voice of the soul.” The minute she said it I knew she was right. Now I feel sure that the creatures responded to “the voice of the soul” amplified through my body. When we human beings finally get it together the natural world is going to respond to us in more wonderful ways than we can ever begin to imagine.

Not everyone is capable of sacrificing his own life. So it is, always has been and always will be.

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as "petite and unopinionated". My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes "short and bossy.

My malady was submission.The symptom: my compliance.The antidote was loud clear boundaries.

How many pages will it take to tell your story?

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!

Those who achieve the extraordinary are usually the most ordinary because they have nothing to prove to anybody. Be Humble.

I try to be perfect but I'm not. I'm perfectly imperfect in every way.

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.

The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it.

I was an unwilling passenger leaving the Big Country. I would miss the mountains and the waterfalls,the treks on broad horses' backs to hidden villages in secret valleys.

Those who live in memories are never really dead.

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.

But you have to remember...that you can't run from unhappiness. You just take it with you.

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

I know of other mothers who have children with disabilities,and right away they loved them and decided to fight for them.That isn’t my story.

Christmas is such a time of struggle anyway, crammed with busy and hurry and the expectation that you will be joyful, no matter what. Then, if you’re like me, when you just sit quietly, just be, and let yourself feel what you feel, the guilt creeps in. Because you’re alive and the world is big, and you should be feeling some freakin’ Christmas spirit.

In the meantime, Mary's mother continued to stock her daughter's 'bottom drawer' which she started when Mary was only five years old.  When we got engaged the 'drawer' was already well stocked but by the time we got married it was more like a well-endowed wardrobe. 

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.