Memoir Quotes - Page 6

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

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

The wisdom of my body had cultivated vibrantly since those sadness-drunken months after the rape when I’d felt so numbed by the hurt and shame that I didn’t move further. No longer. The way I felt about being sexually shamed had changed. Now I was angry that others were trying to shame my sexuality in the first place. I flushed—this time not in shame—but in rage.

I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society…unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool.

There is strange comfort in knowing that no matter what happens today, the Sun will rise again tomorrow.

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

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.

I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw.

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.

BARRY GIFFORD, Author of "Wild at Heart" on DANGEROUS ODDS by Marisa Lankester:"Marisa Lankester's unique chronicle of high crimes and low company is as wild a ride as any reader is likely to be taken on. She was the lone woman in the eye of a predatory hurricane that blew across continents and devastated countless lives. That she survived is testament to her brains and bravery. The old-timers who invented violence as a second language contended that nothing is deadlier than the female, to cross her was to buck dangerous odds, and this book tells you why." Film "Wild at Heart" won Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Film by David Lynch

Fact: upon locking yourself our of your apartment you will immediately need to use the bathroom. Fact: and then you will stand in place and watch your door. You will just stare. As though rebuffed by it. As though it has done this to you.

The freedom of the open road is seductive, serendipitous and absolutely liberating.

There occurs the beautiful feeling that only humanity together is the true human being, and that the individual can be cheerful and happy only if he has the courage to feel himself in the Whole.

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.

I'd have to be impolite, an inconvenience, and sometimes awkward. But if I could commit, all that discomfort would add up to zap predatory threads like a Taser gun. I'd stun them. They'd bow to me. I'd let my no echo against the mountains.And better to feel bad for a moment saying no—and stop it—than to get harmed.I would take better care.That small word, no. I'd see its deity.

Humor writers:1) Write2) Laugh3) Laugh when they write4) Write when they laugh

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

Facts you can bend. Memories are much stronger things.

I recount as this journey begins where I rest to gather the tale from thissame old house resting on the hill, leaving me a view of a carnival once seen from just across the tracks. My pallet is dry now. The colors I see no more. The rain has washed away many of the signs that once stood for a prosperhome and family. My grave is waiting. The dreams once filled my head withimages of world unison, hope and companionship for all. The saga spokenthrough my canvas drew darker as the years went on to the bitter cold nights.All that comes to me now are glimpses of faces that graced my soul.

While some people are good at painting, playing an instrument or singing, I have been told more than once I am good at storytelling. I hope that you enjoy my stories as I recall them.

For now I sit on my final island of the present as my radius of memory shrinks; lost already are the islands of work, of old friendships...Other islands fade as I brood upon them.

Life is a delicate dance. We live in a society that governs we all get along. The invisible fine print, the unwritten rules and regulations state that we appease to each other's nature and in doing so, we by nature, seek to please.

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.

The sun came out, warm on my back through my white school blouse.the streets were familiar, past the old tannery, the Jet garage. Past the Asian corner shop with rainbow jars of Kayli, gobstoppers and sherbert love hearts. I was in love with Frankie.

When I’d RSVPed for tonight, I hadn’t expected to be the youngest by three-plus decades. To be honest, I hadn’t expected anything. I didn’t have the mental capacity. The excitement over my first house party overwhelmed me and kept my thoughts abuzz for threeweeks.Jim and Valerie suggested Harry and Jackie invite me. Understandably, Harry and Jackie were skeptical about bringing a single male into their close-knit group, but Valerie vouched for me, which persuaded Jackie. I leapt at the invitation—any single male would have—but now, learning about the most recent medications to assist smooth menopausal transition, I was seriously rethinking my decision.

Families that feel together, heal together.

...I didn't want to be a passenger on someone else's motorcycle.I wanted to be the one riding that motherfucker.

Transparent tubes divided Phil’s blood into shades of red, fading to straw colored plasma. I watched his fluid swirl past his shoulders and disappear into machines. He offered himself to blood banks all over the city, his plasma rushed to hospitals where it would circulate through other people’s bodies. The map of my love’s tapped arteries would look like a bloodshot eye over the city of Albuquerque. His blood bought us dinner. I dreamed he was my mother, and I nursed his arm. I wrote a poem about it, how I suckled his arm dry like a sore teat.

Everyone has a colorful life. You just have to get out your crayons.

Sherry Carroll is a real life Penny Lane and one wonders if she hasn't got Cameron Crowe or Lester Bangs hidden somewhere in her suburban basement.

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

This was trail magic. Sea Breeze’s fire, his light, his heat, his life, remained, their salvation. It is a fact that all drainages, if followed downhill, lead to the same lowland water body. Lost and fallen hikers follow drainages down because walking ridges is harder. And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path – the one, natural, trodden way. It isn’t a coincidence that Sea Breeze, Brandon Day and Gina Allen, and countless other hikers all wandered, lost, down the same steep slope to nowhere.

Personal writing takes up where public education leaves off – with intent to know what is important about life.

autism is more like retina patterns than measles

She hops expectantly into the sink. I turn on the tap for her; she laps without a glance in my direction, like a duchess so used to being ministered to that she no longer notices the servants and sees only a world where objects dumbly bend to her wishes, doors opening, faucets discharging cool water, delicious things appearing in her dish.

I define success as being the best, authentic me that I can be.

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.

Writing evinces the soul of an active mind and every era produced persons whom devoted their being to exploring the mysteries of life, seeking to discern answers pertaining how to resolve the complexities and paradoxes of life.

May I see the beauty in others without denigrating my own.

The Brit's face shares a heritage with a junkyard butt-sniffing mutt. It's a hard-earned moonshine mug, dotted with a hairy mole that looks like a rat's been gnawing on it. His beard looks like a white sneeze. The teeth are jagged and out of alignment, having opened quarts at Jiffy Quick Lube for half a decade.

How could she have gotten herself here? To this place where she stood by while the man she adored checked out things to share with his wife? You knew what you were getting into. But that wasn’t really true. One never knew, not entirely, not until in really deep. She screamed and seethed in raw silence. Damien came in then, and spooned her. He hadn’t a clue she was an impulse away from getting up, dressing, and leaving. How shocked he would be, if she did that. And he’d conclude that she wasn’t the well-matched true lover that he thought he had finally, at long last, discovered. That thought ploughed a spike deeply through her. It gouged her so much that her breath stopped. It hurt her even more than did the wife. And she knew in that moment while he settled into bliss that she wasn’t going to leave, that leaving hadn’t had the slightest chance.

I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.

Time, we like to say, cures all. But maybe the old saying doesn’t mean time heals. Time cures a secret in its brine, keeping it and finally, paradoxically, destroying it. Nothing is left in that salt solution but the pain or rage, the biting shame that lodged it there. Even they are diluted or denied.

After giving it some thought, I've decided to name my monkey mind Ricky Bobby. I was thinking about Latin names like Javier, but I don't want to make my jumping, distractable self sound mysterious and sexy. Ricky Bobby makes me laugh. A name like that seems silly, not strong. Just a goofy little thing that doesn't know what to do with its hands, likes to go fast, and loves tiny, infant, baby Jesus.

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

Look at what I wrote at the beginning of this memoir. Have I caught anything at all of the extraordinary night when Paul Dempster was born? I am pretty sure that my little sketch of Percy Boyd Staunton is accurate, but what about myself? I have always sneered at autobiographies and memoirs in which the writer appears at the beginning as a charming, knowing little fellow, possessed of insights and perceptions beyond his years, yet offering these with false naivete to the reader, as though to say, 'What a little wonder I was, but All Boy.' Have the writers any notion or true collection of what a boy is?I have and I have reinforced it by forty-five years of teaching boys. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man. Oh these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots' oaths!Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man's idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try. And to begin I must give you some notion of the village in which Percy Boyd Staunton and Paul Dempster and I were born.

I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn't find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible.

If you had met my father you would never, not for an instant, have thought he was an assassin.

Children believe they are immortal, death is an empty word like the name of a country they’ve never been to on a time-faded map. I wasn’t a child anymore.

Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?""Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.

With an accelerated schedule of launch in just two months, NASA and contractor launch and support teams labor steadily with six-day work weeks by day and night shifts

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

[V]alue your dreams but . . . be wary of them also, . . . look for integrity in unusual places.

He would never admit it, but he did have a heart of gold under all that crud.Solid, hard, impenetrable gold, but still gold, nonetheless.

Storytelling is an ancient art. The lucent vibes of stories express what we cannot articulate directly. When we hear someone’s story, we respond to the spark of humanness within ourselves that seeks to come out in the light and greet the world. When we tell the stories of our lives, we give voice to people bereft of speech, we make the persons whom we love or loved immortal, and we pass along our familiarity with the natural and physical world.

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

It took me almost two thousand miles in the woods to see I had to do some hard work that wasn’t simply walking—that I needed to begin respecting my own body’s boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me. Moving forward, I wanted rules.First—when I felt unsafe I’d leave, immediately. The first time, not the tenth time. Not after a hundred red flags smacked in wind violently, clear as trail signs pointing the way to SNAKES. Not after I’d been bitten—the violation. If I wasn’t interested, I would reject the man blatantly.

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.

Your heartbeat is so different from his," I whisper it; he has to ask me to repeat myself. I explain, "My father…his heartbeat was so fast. I could feel it, racing…it was like his heartbeat shook my whole body. Your heart…it's steady. It feels safe. It's calming me down." And so we stand, and I cry, and listen to his heart until I am calm again, and then we get back to cleaning.

In this week I see such a picture of life, hard and joyful pressed up together and sleeping in the same bed. They come knit together. The lines of pain run through the joy and remind us to go all in, because life is short. The joy edges the pain and gives us a reason to rise.