112 Memorable Memoir Quotes

Memoirs provide an intimate glimpse into the lives and thoughts of individuals who have experienced the extraordinary, the everyday, and everything in between. They capture the raw, unfiltered essence of human experience and offer insights that can resonate deeply with readers. In this collection, we've curated 112 memorable memoir quotes that span a wide range of emotions and experiences. These quotes not only reflect the diverse narratives of their authors but also offer universal truths and moments of reflection that can inspire and connect us all. Dive in and discover the power of memoir to illuminate, challenge, and transform perspectives.

1. “Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.” - Stephanie Klein

2. “So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.” - Elbert Hubbard

3. “I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.” - Karen Armstrong

4. “Your heart is the size of your fist; keep loving, keep fighting.” - Ariel Gore

5. “Whatever it takes to break your heart and wake you up is grace.” - Mark Matousek

6. “In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!” - Marjane Satrapi

7. “You are putting yourself in serious danger...'I think that I preferred to put myself in serious danger rather than confront my shame. My shame at not having become someone, the shame of not having made my parents proud after all the sacrifices they had made for me. The shame of having become a mediocre nihilist.” - Marjane Satrapi

8. “Oh my!! How you've grown. Soon you'll be catching the Lord's balls.” - Marjane Satrapi

9. “I write so that my handful of pebbles, cast daily into still waters, will produce a ripple. ” - Anne Schroeder

10. “A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.” - Guy Sajer

11. “I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me. Ah, yes, let me count your cracks. Let's see, one hundred, two... yes, you'll do nicely. A cracked companion makes me look more whole, gives me something outside myself to care for. When I'm with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks, the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself.” - Julie Gregory

12. “The greatest challenge of my life has been to see and accept the actual truth without great pain and struggle against it.” - M.C. Halliday

13. “Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember them, it's because they contain a larger truth that your readers will recognize in their own lives. Think small and you'll wind up finding the big themes in your family saga. ” - William Zinsser

14. “Each of us is a book waiting to be written, and that book, if written, results in a person explained.” - Thomas M. Cirignano

15. “I'm often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.” - Haruki Murakami

16. “Chasing angels or fleeing demons, go to the mountains.” - Jeffrey Rasley

17. “Staring at my smoldering hot date, her husband stands tall for the first time in a decade, adjusting his toupee while flashing a horrid green toothy grin that looks more like a Steven Hawkins muscle spasm. In his hands, a frightened beer bottle is choked with the steel grip of a sexually repressed Preacher.” - Brett Tate

18. “Tatiana is a ridiculously curvy thing of dreams, with smooth succulent thighs, long strawberry blond cascading beneath a teal bandana, and a nympho sparkle in her eyes that says pick me, lick me, spank me, or I punish you. Raw innocence and mayhem at once.” - Brett Tate

19. “Never in our silent moments of illusion do we sense the dark parallel that lives next to us. Nor do we suspect the carrier.” - Kris Allen Courtney

20. “The morning opens, a mist of innocence appears across the countryside that tells each one of us the day is new. That feeling of hope, love and the humble awareness of our duty becomes clear if even for a moment. It is that experience of inspiration that follows us into a small town woken by a cool frost on this Sunday morning and the laughter of children playing.” - Kris Courtney

21. “To me he seemed one of those persons destined to failure of whom you wonder what purpose it can ever serve that they should have ben born.” - Maugham Somerset William

22. “The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners...” - Natalie Goldberg

23. “Ignore the misery. Custom invites you to ignore the misery."SHOW YOUR TONGUE” - Günter Grass

24. “Where are you from? New York?""Weird you picked up on that," she said, "I've been gone from there for so long."Like a couple of decades could dilute that accent.” - Cathie Beck

25. “Stories nurture our connection to place and to each other. They show us where we have been and where we can go. They remind us of how to be human, how to live alongside the other lives that animate this planet. ... When we lose stories, our understanding of the world is less rich, less true.” - Susan J. Tweit

26. “I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.” - Anne Lamott

27. “Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.” - Stephen King

28. “The point, I decided, wasn't to have the autobiography or even the memories. The point was who I became when I wrote.” - Elizabeth J. Andrew

29. “To tell a tale so great as to tear the soul inside out"Sara Niles, Torn From the Inside Out” - Sara Niles

30. “If you don't like it, Eat me.” - Rae Murphy

31. “If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it?” - S. Kelley Harrell

32. “As Samson demonstrated, going bald ruins lives.” - Brendan Jack

33. “I would not say I am looking for God. Or, I am not looking for God precisely. I am not seeking the God I learned about as a Catholic child, as an 18-year-old novice in a religious community, as an agnostic graduate student, as - but who cares about my disguises? Or God's.” - Mary Rose O'Reilley

34. “Had I glimpsed just a little of the suffering I would witness and the heartbreak I would endure, I would have fled in the other direction...But I could not foresee any of these things...And many years later, with tears in my eyes, I remembered my decision to follow this God no matter what the cost.” - Daniel Walker

35. “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.” - Patricia Hampl

36. “Civilization is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized.” - Mark Rowlands

37. “Memory for most is a kind of afterlife; for my mother, it is another form of life.” - Fern Schumer Chapman

38. “Most German perpetrators were never punished or rewarded for their behavior, but they had learned something about themselves. They know what they did or didn't do in the most morally fraught moment of their lives. They have seen themselves in extreme circumstances and, in that, they have seen their own extremes.” - Fern Schumer Chapman

39. “I like it here. I like the girls, and I like the DJ's, and the cocktail waitresses, and the loud rock'n'roll (though I would happily beat everyone in Poison to death with the severed limbs of the members of Warrant).” - Craig Machen

40. “...my sisters are tough. Our strength is in our laughter (Dan)” - Amanda Welch

41. “Haunted by demons of the past, hounded by demons not yet met, the nevermore and evermore left her little peace.” ~A Tale of Two Women” - Kimberly Kinrade

42. “She has learned to love. To fear. To hate. And then to love again. Through it all, she writes.” ~Once Upon A Time There Was A Girl” - Kimberly Kinrade

43. “Everything bleeds into everything and fiction is just this funny desperate little attempt to staunch the bleeding.” - Meghan Lamb

44. “You know, everybody's ignorant, just on different subjects.” - Will Rogers

45. “All family stories are important, just as all people are important, and they deserve to be passed along.” - Karen Chamberlain

46. “The features of character are carved out of adversity.” - Rick Barnett

47. “Mistakes? That's why they put erasers on pencils.” - Rick Barnett

48. “I've had cancer twice and if I had to pick one fate for you, cancer or fertility problems-I'd pick cancer.” - Kelly Corrigan

49. “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

50. “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.” - William "Billy" Packer

51. “I learned in therapy the word "No" is a complete sentence.” - Jaycee Dugard

52. “Another note to self; turn cellphone to silent when you’re trying to be sneaky.” - Suzie Ivy

53. “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

54. “Love was like notches on a speaker that could be cranked up and down, the decibels of desire, the frequencies of feeling. Sometimes she thought that she might have cranked it all the way up and broken the dial before the music had even started.” - Alice Pung

55. “She had always thought the word 'pheromones' made it sound as though molecules were floating in the air, shaped like little fluted horns, ready to attach themselves to the nearest target. Microscopic Edison phonographs flying about, their brassy mouths puckered to sucker onto bare unsuspecting skin. These were what he sent out to her. The pheromones. The eyeless babies of energy.” - Alice Pung

56. “Love was a verb with a certain amount of energy attached to it - a daily quota - and you had to choose on whom you wanted to spend this energy. That was love. That was why people had to pray for it. If it were not finite, no one would pine for love in their lives - they would just wait to receive or learn to give.” - Alice Pung

57. “Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.” - Roberto Bolaño

58. “You have what it takes! Believe! You are the one with the dream. You own it. And you will walk through the open doors. Nothing can stop you.. Risk, even if you make mistakes. So live with faith and abandon. Have some fun. You are being carried...” - Evan Edwards

59. “In those days, there was no money to buy books.” - Ernest Hemingway

60. “You can make a difference in another person's life and not realize it, just by giving them One Moment of your time, One Memory to recall, One Motion that tells them they are not alone! OM!” - Deb Simpson

61. “One last characteristic of the memoir that is important to recognize is one which also applies to essays, and which Georg Lukacs described as "the process of judging." This may seem problematic to some, since...we connect it with 'judgmental,' often used nowadays as a derogatory word. But the kind of judgment necessary to the good personal essay, or to the memoir, is not that nasty tendency to oversimplify and dismiss other people out of hand but rather the willingness to form and express complex opinions, both positive and negative.If the charm of memoir is that we, the readers, see the author struggling to understand her past, then we must also see the author trying out opinions she may later shoot down, only to try out others as she takes a position about the meaning of her story. The memoirist need not necessarily know what she thinks about her subject but she must be trying to find out; she may never arrive at a definitive verdict, but she must be willing to share her intellectual and emotional quest for answers. Without this attempt to make a judgment, the voice lacks interest, the stories, becalmed in the doldrums of neutrality, become neither fiction nor memoir, and the reader loses respect for the writer who claims the privilege of being the hero in her own story without meeting her responsibility to pursue meaning. Self revelation without analysis or understanding becomes merely an embarrassment to both reader and writer.” - Judith Barrington

62. “Understanding the Way of Story as a sacred pattern and a living event. Story can reveal a spiritual path and or the way to healing. Stories become the foundation of health, peacebuilding and vision. Learning to listen, to recognize, to understand and attend the teachings and revelations of the Stories we have been given to live guides us toward the 5th world. Our individual stories, when carefully attended, can reveal each person’s particular path of healing and transformation. Even illness is a story that can lead us to our own and to community healing. Learning to recognize the Story that we or another is living can be a worthy life work.” - Deena Metzger

63. “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.” - Margaret Leis Hanna

64. “A lot of men tend to want "models"I tell men, unless they look like a model themselves, they can't expect to land one.” - Trisha Ventker

65. “You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.” - Michael J. Fox

66. “In my mother's book, a vegetarian is somebody who is not concern with his or her diet and health. "Someone who prefer bush and grass, as if they is sheeps and cows, is somebody who don't have enough food to put in his mouth," she always say.Only vegetarians eat dryfood regularly—and like to eat it, too. It is not considered normal for a person to cook food that doesn't have some amount o' meat or fish to go with it. Only someone who is starving, who don't have money to buy a fish head or a single flying fish or even the head of a dolphin—in other words, a person who is "catching his arse"—has to eat dryfood. A person at this stage is a person one remove from having to cook bakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner.” - Austin Clarke

67. “An intensely gripping narrative...expertly crafted and totally addictive...a must read!” - Maggie Reese

68. “The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story.” - Dorothy Gallagher

69. “If you want help in starting to write memoirs, you don't want to fall into the clutches of a famous writer who has been hired to teach at a writing workshop solely because of his name's ability to attract students, rather than because of any teaching skill. You should not have to grapple with someone who secretly thinks you should be writing about his life rather than your own.” - Judith Barrington

70. “She would (if she could) put her arm around the girl she'd been and try to tell her Take it easy, but the girl would not have listened. The girl had no receptors for Take it easy. And besides, "Hey Jude" was on the radio, it was her prayer, her manifesto, almost her dwelling place. She sang it everywhere. The music made her cry then; it makes her cry now. Listening to it now brings back memories so sharp they taste like blood in her mouth.” - Abigail Thomas

71. “We had our family patterns and were quite comfortable in them, which made it even more shocking when, just after his eightieth birthday, Papa began bringing up his time as a prisoner of war in Germany.Of course, I had always known that he had served in World War II and been captured, just like I had always know the stories about my grandmother and the build of their house. It's that peculiar type of family memory, where someone has obviously told you but you were too young to remember actually hearing it, so it seems like knowledge that was instilled at birth. Papa never brought it up, and my parents said they hadn't heard him mention it once in the previous fifty years. But suddenly, he was talking.” - Jesse Cozean

72. “There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's own experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least, in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured.” - Anne Morrow Lindbergh

73. “He was a simple honest man. He never strayed,He never drank, he never smoked, and he never kissed a maid.And when he passed away his insurance was denied,Because he never lived, they claimed he never died.” - Ted Gup

74. “But you have to remember...that you can't run from unhappiness. You just take it with you.” - Karen Wheeler

75. “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

76. “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” - Frederick L Coxen

77. “I'd rather be single, happy, and lonely sometimes than married, lonely, and happy sometimes.” - Mark Fiore

78. “Chris didn’t need to learn how to conquer fear. He had to embrace it, walk with it and listen to it.” - Michelle Tackabery

79. “God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.” - Francis Spufford

80. “I was always an odd child, though I had no idea what odd was, really.” - Patti Larsen

81. “Just because I am paranoid does not mean that someone is not out to get me” - Don Darkes

82. “...I really did "choose" to be Jim every single day, but that once I put my sword down I haven't chosen Jenny at all; I simply wake up and here I am.” - Jennifer Finney Boylan

83. “There's nothing gay about living life straight” - Paul B. Tripp

84. “That night I slept like a baby. When I woke the next morning I knew I was going to smoke heroin again. Everything that day was enjoyable: sitting on the bus, working all day – it all felt good. It was the best day of my life.” - Christine Lewry

85. “[Memory]... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as having happened together. The actual year or season or time of day shifts to a different one. Many details are lost, usually in ways that serve the self in its present situation, not the self of ten or twenty or forty years ago when the remembered event took place. And even the fresh memory, the 'original,' is not reliable in a documentary sense....Memory, in short, is not a record of the past but an evolving myth of understanding the psyche spins from its engagement with the world.” - John Daniel

86. “once ruffle-skirted vanity table where I primped at thirteen, opening drawers to a private chaos of eyeshadows lavender teal sky-blue, swarms of hair pins pony tail fasteners, stashes of powders, colonies of tiny lipsticks (p.39)” - Barbara Blatner

87. “...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)” - Barbara Blatner

88. “I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)” - Barbara Blatner

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

90. “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.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

91. “The onset of adulthood is an organic, creeping process. No one wakes up one day and decides, "Lo, on this day I shall forever put away childish things and begin clipping coupons to go to Wal-Mart.” - David Carr

92. “I had to get a close-hand view of the misery and unhappiness of a man made world, before I reached the point where I could successfully revolt against it.” - Emmeline Pankhurst

93. “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

94. “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.” - William Kittredge

95. “Sometimes I dream that I'm writing a memoir. A memoir would just be the thing to keep me in the hearts and memories of my adoring public.” - John Green

96. “I used to teach at an abused children's home. I told the kids, "You all have a manure pile of memories. Nothing you can do about that. Now you can drown in the stink or turn it into compost and grow a garden. I wouldn't't be as good a teacher to you if I didn't know what you're going through. That way, I make my memories do good instead of letting them eat me. I'm like Herbie from Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. I pulled my Bumble's teeth. He's still big and scary but he can't bite me anymore.” - Rebecca O'Donnell

97. “The interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid story; it even begins to hear rumors, from beyond the horizon skin’s rim, of nations and wars. You wake one day and discover your grandmother; you wake another day and notice, like any curious naturalist, the boys.” - Annie Dillard

98. “So this needs to be said, and so I will try to say it” - Jason Najum

99. “It's the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim” - Jason Najum

100. “After college I got a job and started working. This new career had absolutely nothing to do with my degree.” - Jason Najum

101. “A lifelong movie I already knew the ending to” - Jason Najum

102. “I avoided one-on-one situations, eye contact, and healthy relationships. Instead I took refuge in drinking too much, cheap sex, and sarcasm.” - Jason Najum

103. “What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think—the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn’t known. Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie’s rim as you climbed its cliffs. And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another. Knowledge wasn’t a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being—whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars.” - Annie Dillard

104. “I carried with me into the West End Bar, the White Horse Tavern, a long list of things I would never do: I would never have my hair set in a beauty parlor. I would never move to a suburb and bake cakes or make casseroles. I would never go to a country club dance, although I did like the paper lanterns casting rainbow colors on the terrace. I would never invest in the stock market. I would never play canasta. I would never wear pearls. I would love like a nursling but I would never go near a man who had a portfolio or a set of golf clubs or a business or even a business suit. I would only love a wild thing. I didn't care if wild things tended to break hearts. I didn't care if they substituted scotch for breakfast cereal. I understood that wild things wrote suicide notes to the gods and were apt to show up three hours later than promised. I understood that art was long and life was short.” - Anne Roiphe

105. “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.” - Annie Dillard

106. “The rock I'd seen in my life looked dull because in all ignorance I'd never thought to knock it open. People have cracked ordinary New England pegmatite - big, coarse granite - and laid bare clusters of red garnets, or topaz crystals, chrysoberyl, spodumene, emerald. They held in their hands crystals that had hung in a hole in the dark for a billion years unseen. I was all for it. I would lay about me right and left with a hammer, and bash the landscape to bits. I would crack the earth's crust like a piñata and spread to the light the vivid prizes in chunks within. Rock collecting was opening the mountains. It was like diving through my own interior blank blackness to remember the startling pieces of a dream: there was a blue lake, a witch, a lighthouse, a yellow path. It was like poking about in a grimy alley and finding an old, old coin. Nothing was at it seemed. The earth was like a shut eye. Mother's not dead, dear - she's only sleeping. Pry open the thin lid and find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed and sidereal beauty. Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetical flowers. They lengthened and spread, adding plane to plane in awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones - maybe only the stones - understood.” - Annie Dillard

107. “I am in the unthinkable situation that people cannot bear to contemplate.” - Sonali Deraniyagala

108. “Work hard. "Suit yourself, then you'll know at least one person is pleased.” - Carole Estrup

109. “Your past doesn't dictate what your future will be.” - Jillian Bullock

110. “My father has the proper degrees and framed pictures on the walls, though they're mostly taped over with photos of children, family and friends. Images from the past and present and trips and experiences combined with files on the floor – it's a happening or collage in progress.” - Alex McKeithen

111. “We mask our needs as the needs of others.” - Terry Tempest Williams

112. “That's the thing about parents, I'm beginning to realize. You don't have to see them all that much to imitate them.” - Leigh Newman