Top 100 Life Memoir Quotes
#1. 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.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
#2. I'm not into this memoir craze that's been going on for 20 years now and doesn't seem to ever let up. People just indiscriminately say "memoir" now when it's a person writing about their own life.
Richard Hell
#3. There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.
Augusten Burroughs
#4. As well as writing, 2004 saw my first attempt at wine making: the elixir of life. Unfortunately, my effort tasted more like the elixir of death.
Craig Briggs
#6. One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can't drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.
Andre Dubus III
#7. It is a beautiful and scary thing to sit open-handed and let all your plans float away like dust.
Anna White
#8. We're distracted and we let the door slam on the person behind us, we trip over curbs as we're texting, we're...sedentary, weighed down, collapsed over the laptop. ...We've forgotten how to move through life with grace.
Sarah L. Kaufman
#9. Cheney's memoir is not about 9/11, or solely about Bush's administration, but about his entire life and political career.
Elliott Abrams
#10. You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life.
Abigail Thomas
#11. It is important to measure ourselves at least once in life, undertake a personal odyssey that constructs a clarifying prism of our being.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#12. A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform the event, deliver wisdom.
David Shields
#14. 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.
Vera Brittain
#15. To make one think is to change a generation, to build one thought is to grow a better world
Yolanda De Iuliis
#16. I believe God lets us stumble along, slowly finding our way, and giving us chances to pick each other up.
Anna White
#17. 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.
Anna White
#18. In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.
Sherman Alexie
#19. Disney will never make a movie about my life story, and that's a shame
I'd make a really cute animated creature.
Kate Bornstein
#20. Every day is a new beginning, the building of a habit. Every action is a step in some direction. There is no pause in living.
Anna White
#21. I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.
Sue Monk Kidd
#23. I applied at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard after my band broke up. I really wanted to work there because it involved the love of my life, music. It was also located on the world famous Sunset Strip, a place I dreamed of going to ever since I was a teenager in the 80's to become a rock star.
K.D. Sanders
#24. This is the only advice I offer you. Pick the small thing, and carry it on. Let it change your life.
Anna White
#25. Frank Berliners spiritual memoir is beautifully crafted and written. It is a tale about love, and the great longing that springs from there - to learn, to grow, to be real, and to forge a genuine connection with oneself and others, with life, and with death. I highly recommend it.
John Welwood
#26. What we dedicate today is not a memorial to war, rather it's a tribute to the physical and moral courage that makes heroes out of farm and city boys and that inspires Americans in every generation to lay down their lives for people they will never meet, for ideals that make life itself worth living.
Bob Dole
#27. I thought of my sweet little girl and her chubby cheeks, big brown eyes and long brown hair with bangs that constantly needed trimming. She was all that really mattered in this world, and I could not keep moping over some guy who came in and out of my life faster than a season of American Idol.
Kate Madison
#28. What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century
Max Beerbohm
#29. Telling our personal story reveals the shape shifting landscape of our mind.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#31. It is a fundamental misperception," Fouts says to me, "to think human life has more value than any other life form.
Lauren Slater
#32. I actually find it pretty tedious when magazines ask me to write articles based on my real life, because I've already lived it and there's nothing new to discover. So, I'm unlikely to write a memoir.
Nick Earls
#33. The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.
Michiko Kakutani
#34. Memoir is about handing over you life to someone and saying, This is what I went through, this is who I am, and maybe you can learn something from it.
Jeannette Walls
#36. All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life without having babies.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#37. I often wonder if you wrote your memoir today, if your life story would be lived on the edge of possibility, if you held wonder in one hand and courage in the other and truly believed that anything was possible.
Jean Houston
#38. In life, we all have a cross to bear and a unique story to tell. We just hope that someone will take the time to listen.
Greg McVicker
#39. 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.
Azelene Williams
#40. Unless you're a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That's the quality I've found most consistently in those life-story writers I've met.
Mary Karr
#42. I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.
Paul Auster
#43. Not everyone is capable of sacrificing his own life. So it is, always has been and always will be.
Tadeusz Pankiewicz
#44. Choose this life. Choose this body. Say yes to all of it. Say yes to the beauty and the good and the ugly and the difficult. Choose what you have, what you are. Choose this moment. Choose to love and remember. You are full. You are alive.
Kimber Simpkins
#45. All throughout our lives, we selectively draw on selected shavings of life events and reflect upon them through consciousness, creating an arranged catalogue of senses, faculties, and mental activities that compose our personal life story.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#46. I couldn't tear my eyes away from the blood. As odd as it sounds, I felt irritated. I'd just cleaned that glass when I first came in on my shift today. Knowing Jim, he'd make me clean them again before I could go home. After he chewed me out, of course.
Rose Wynters
#47. My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated.
Joyce Carol Oates
#48. In the process of my evolution, I became a victim of domestic war, an emotional casualty for a major portion of my life, entwined, entrapped and emotionally involved, until I learned how to become free.
Sara Niles
Torn From the Inside Out
Sara Niles
#49. 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.
Maria Waters
#50. 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.
Claire Sylvia
#51. If variety is the spice of life, then my life must be one of the spiciest you ever heard of. A curry of a life. -Paul Child
Julia Child
#52. Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?
Slash Coleman
#53. 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.
Anna White
#54. I think when life gets heavy, people look for an escape. "The Love Boat" is an escape. We have happy endings. You don't see many of those around. I think it gave people a vicarious adventure.
Gavin MacLeod
#55. It is an empty room, that afterwards, a soledad, and it sits there at the center of a person's life and waits to be filled.
Daisy Hernandez
#56. The purpose of my life is not to get what I want. The purpose of my life is to become who I am.
Cara Lopez Lee
#57. 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.
Eve Ensler
#58. Everyone has a colorful life. You just have to get out your crayons.
Benay Nordby
#59. 'Amazing Grace' is not a book of interviews or onetime snapshots. It's a memoir of a journey that took me into a place I had never been and took over two years of my life. I don't think the people in this book would have said the things to me that they did if they perceived me as a reporter.
Jonathan Kozol
#60. 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.
Chuma Nwokolo
#61. I know I shouldn't introduce my own memoir with this amount of insecurity, but my personal life philosophy is always to assume the worst, then you're never disappointed. BAM! Highlight that previous sentence, baby!
Felicia Day
#62. If you want self-esteem." "Do estimable acts" ~ V, from A Piece of Cake: Memoir
Cupcake Brown
#63. Have you ever gotten to a point where you looked at your own life, thought "Fu** this," and reached for the economy-sized Valium? Ah, suicide. So dark and seductive.
Rebecca O'Donnell
#64. Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.
Gillian Marchenko
#65. When you write your memoir you will understand, perhaps for the first time, the significance of your life through the language, images and emotions you craft from the memory.
Maureen Murdock
#66. Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
Shirley Jackson
#67. It's a memoir of various events in my own life, but it's also a teaching book: along the way I explain the writing decisions I made. They are the same decisions that confront every writer going in search of his or her past: matters of selection, reduction, organization and tone.
William Zinsser
#68. To my surprise, the more I searched about Qi Xiangfu, the more I found of a life lived partly online. He once wrote a short memoir in which he described himself in the third person, with the formality usually reserved for China's most famous writers.
Evan Osnos
#69. 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.
Katandra Jackson Nunnally
#70. I name you today, heart fears. I am small, but you are smaller. You will not stop me. You have a voice, fears, and I must listen, but then I will open my heart. I will love you right to death.
Anna White
#71. Famed value investor Guy Spier has managed to write what is both a gripping memoir and a fascinating study of what it takes to succeed in investing and life. A must read!
John Mihaljevic
#73. I encourage anyone who has gone through hardships to look back through their life's chapters and see what can be turned into a book. For you never know what heartache God, one day, can turn into a redemptive story.
Jolina Petersheim
#74. If there is no fate and our interactions depend on such a complex system of chance encounters, what potentially important connections do we fail to make? What life changing relationships or passionate and lasting love affairs are lost to chance?
Simon Pegg
#75. Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.
Aleksandar Hemon
#76. I always felt awkward and unfinished, unworthy of love, suspicious of affection offered. My mother's absence became a great presence in my life.
Marilyn Sewell
#77. A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person's life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life.
Richard Hell
#78. I'm writing this memoir from the perspective of somebody who's prosperous and has means. Having said that, one of the things that I think I discovered about those additional years is that I don't think they really are added to the end of life.
Anna Quindlen
#79. 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.
A.R. Cecil
#80. It starts with a single breath and the present moment, but where it takes you is into the vast radiance of your true nature, into a magical, spacious life.
Narissa Doumani
#81. I'd rather be single, happy, and lonely sometimes than married, lonely, and happy sometimes.
Mark Fiore
#82. She tells me life is a story. We can make it a Harlequin romance, a mistery, a memoir. We can make it pamphlet-size or an ongoing series.
"I want mine to be exceptional", she says.
Katie Kacvinsky
#83. I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.
Peter Carey
#84. When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do.
Conor Oberst
#85. 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.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#86. The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story.
Dorothy Gallagher
#87. The griefs that have been hardest for me were the ones I didn't recognize as griefs, because they came in what were supposed to be the best times of my life. No one whispered in my ear that the best times, the ones that change our lives, are woven with the thread of loss.
Anna White
#88. I read The Bell Jar, and then I read her memoir and her diaries, and a third book, an outside opinion. Just the way she made the pillows so neat on the oven door. It just seems to be the opposite of, if you're going to take your life, in a horrible rage it happens.
Paul Westerberg
#89. The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.
Salman Rushdie
#90. This is the whistle-stop memoir of how a lower-middle-class girl from the north of England one day changed the way she lived her life and set off on a bumpy path that ultimately led her to her own slice of the happily-ever-after pie.
Tillie Cole
#91. My book 'Trust Your Heart', which is the story of my life, will be followed by 'Singing Lessons', a memoir of love, loss, hope, and healing, which talks about the death of my son and the hope that has been the aftermath of the healing from that tragedy.
Judy Collins
#92. I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.
Rachel Cusk
#93. I ain't never saw a hearse with a luggage rack." (Quote by George Strait, country singer, and appearing at the end of Bob Mitchell's memoir, Time for a Heart-to-Heart: Reflections on Life in the Face of Death.
George Strait
#94. Love lights our darkness. It is forever tries.
Anna White
#95. The memoir as a somewhat indistinct form is absolutely true. So many of the memoirs I've read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir and the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#96. In life you'll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it's because they're stupid. That will help keep you from reacting to their cruelty. Because there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance ... Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself.
Marjane Satrapi
#97. Writing reflects life and life is a mystery. All any of us can do is press the fleet footed beauty of life close to our flesh and use whatever instruments are within our grasp to express the evanescent spark of mysticism that resides within us.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#98. What if you had such severe schizophrenia that your life was just one hallucination after another? And what if people kept trying to drag you back out of those hallucinations, to prove that you weren't living in reality and that reality was nothing more than a psych hospital? Would you go?
Jonathan Harnisch
#99. A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth. In a memoir, I look at myself, my life, and the people I love the most in the mirror of the blank screen. In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write honestly, I have to confront my demons.
Isabel Allende
#100. Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life.
Fern Schumer Chapman
