118 Memoir Quotes To Inspire

Memoirs have long captivated readers with their raw honesty, profound insights, and the ability to transport us into the personal experiences of others. Each quote carries a unique story, offering a glimpse into the author's mind and the lessons they've learned along the way. Whether you're searching for a spark of inspiration, a comforting thought, or a fresh perspective, you're in the right place. Dive into this curated collection of the top 118 memoir quotes and let their wisdom inspire your own journey.

1. “...if that energy could have been channelled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.” - Michael Herr

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

3. “A marriage, willy-nilly, requires you to trust that your spouse will tell your story truthfully and lovingly when you are no longer around to tell it yourself.” - Kate Braestrup

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

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

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

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

8. “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

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

10. “Unbefuckinglievable.” - Toby Young

11. “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

12. “...We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned withpot coffin or ceremony, our hasty untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.” - Ghada Karmi

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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.” - Augusten Burroughs

16. “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

17. “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.” - Brett Tate

18. “In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.” - Kevin Alan Lee

19. “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

20. “Murphy's law inverted: What can go right, will go right. (Works if you're an optimist.)” - Saloma Miller Furlong

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “This is a work of memory -- facts have been altered. Names have been changed.” - Lavinia Greenlaw

25. “It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it.” - Elizabeth Wurtzel

26. “Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.” - Elizabeth Wurtzel

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, "We *told* you not to tell." But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.” - Anne Lamott

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

32. “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

33. “Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us to little more than animals, humanity in the shape of our saintly medical officers triumphed over barbarism.Remember, while it always seems darkest before the dawn, perseverance pays off and the good times will return.” - Alistair Urquhart

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

35. “The clown was an evil one. They’re either good or bad, and this one was definitely the latter.” - Chris Thrall

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

37. “Our destiny is aligned with our heart's innermost longing, a longing embedded within our soul before birth. This longing is a unique pattern or configuration reminiscent of the constellations in the night sky. When we express (press out) our unique configuration, it shines through us with an otherworldly luminosity, manifesting abundance in our lives and the lives of others. Our sole task is to yoke our inner destiny, thread it through our lives and weave it into the world. All else is just shadows and dust.” - Thea Euryphaessa

38. “What to wear on a Minnesota farm? The older farmers I know wear brown polyester jumpsuits, like factory workers. The younger ones wear jeans, but the forecast was for ninety-five degrees with heavy humidity. The wardrobe of Quaker ladies in their middle years runs to denim skirts and hiking boots. This outfit had worked fine for me in England. But one of my jobs in Minnesota will be to climb onto the industrial cuisinart in the hay barn and mix fifty-pound bags of nutritional supplement and corn into blades as big as my body. Getting a skirt caught in that thing would be bad news for Betty Crocker.” - Mary Rose O'Reilley

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

42. “It's why I get miffed at all the dashing around in recent zombie films. It completely misses the point; transforms the threat to a straightforward physical danger from the zombies themselves, rather than our own inability to avoid them and these films are about us, not them. There's far more meat on the bones of the latter, far more juicy interpretation to get our teeth into. The first zombie is by comparison thin and one dimensional and ironically, it is down to all the exercise.” - Simon Pegg

43. “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

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

45. “The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map.” - Fern Schumer Chapman

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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

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

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

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

52. “It has always been on the written page that the world has come into focus for me. If I can piece all these bits of memory together with the diaries and letters and the scribbled thoughts that clutter my mind and bookshelves, then maybe I can explain what happened. Maybe the worlds I have inhabited for the past seven years will assume order and logic and wholeness on paper. Maybe I can tell my story in a way that is useful to someone else.” - Nancy Horan

53. “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

54. “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

55. “Who have you helped today"?” - V.

56. “Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.” - William Least Heat-Moon

57. “With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.” - William Least Heat-Moon

58. “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.” - Darin Strauss

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

60. “I had received a t-shirt from my best friend Veronica at my police academy graduation. It reads, ‘Throw your donut in the opposite direction and the cops won’t get you.’ I love wearing that t-shirt.” - Suzie Ivy

61. “Even sentenced to twenty-five years in prison Ted didn’t get what he deserved. Maybe his prison mates would give it to him.” - Suzie Ivy

62. “Be good, or good at it.” - Belo Cipriani

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “Now, through an act as simple as walking across a stage and collecting an empty plastic folder representing a degree, our stock had plummeted to nothing, the wretched leavings of some cosmic Ponzi scheme. A lifetime's worth of planning and training and delusion gone with the wind. Some of us were moving home to live free of charge in our parents' guest rooms, or if we were thin enough, heading west to try our luck in L.A.; others, to our collective horror, were being forced to work at actual jobs.” - Rachel Shukert

69. “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

70. “Any action a woman engages in from a spirit of joy, and within a similarly safe and joyous environment, falls within the city-walls of feminism. A girl has a right to dance how she wants, when her favourite record comes on.” - Caitlin Moran

71. “If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line.” - Baby Halder

72. “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

73. “Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre.” - Andy Behrman

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

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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called "Rushdie," and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.” - Salman Rushdie

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

80. “Dogs possess a quality that's rare among humans--the ability to make you feel valued just by being you--and it was something of a miracle to me to be on the receiving end of all that acceptance. The dog didn't care what I looked like, or what I did for a living, or what a train wreck of a life I'd led before I got her, or what we did from day to day. She just wanted to be with me, and that awareness gave me a singular sensation of delight. I kept her in a crate at night until she was housebroken, and in the mornings I'd let her up onto the bed with me. She'd writhe with joy at that. She'd wag her tail and squirm all over me, lick my neck and face and eyes and ears, get her paws all tangled in my braid, and I'd just lie there, and I'd feel those oceans of loss from my past ebbing back, ebbing away, and I'd hear myself laugh out loud.” - Caroline Knapp

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

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

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

84. “This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . . to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on. This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . . to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves, to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.” - Oswald Spengler

85. “I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.” - Marya Hornbacher

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

87. “I try to walk around without being noticed but I can’t help attracting attention with my pink Mohawk, black clothing and steel toes, and often I’m with Holly and we’re both tall and arrogant.” - Jo Treggiari

88. “When I first met Billy I thought about sucking his eyes right out of their sockets. They’re like turquoise gum drops.” - Jo Treggiari

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

90. “Although my understanding of exactly how much trouble I was in grew more specific over time, as a child I surely understood enough about my condition to know it was something I'd better keep private. By intuition I was certain that the thing I knew to be true was something others would find both impossible and hilarious. My conviction, by the way, had nothing to do with a desire to be feminine, but it had everything to do with being female. Which is an odd believe for a person born male. It certainly had nothing to do with whether I was attracted to girls or boys. This last point was the one that, years later, would most frequently elude people, including the overeducated smarty-pants who constituted much of my inner circle. But being gay or lesbian is about sexual orientation. Being transgedered is about identity.” - Jennifer Finney Boylan

91. “...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

92. “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

93. “The stars were withdrawn, small, giving no light, unlike other nights when they seemed to hang large from the sky ready to be reached for and taken into our hands.” - Sanora Babb

94. “[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

95. “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

96. “They had buried him under our elm tree, they said -- yet this was not totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.” - Willie Morris

97. “Why should I be frightened of dying? I did not know what death truly was; no one did. Who had made dying a bad word? Yes, it was universally considered awful—unwanted, painful, feared—because when it happened it stopped us from moving and being, and we interpreted that as if something had ended. But what if it were actually a beautiful experience? What if, with death, something actually began instead?” - Charles Novacek

98. “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

99. “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

100. “Whether or not you employ humor in dealing with difficult subjects, the tone of the writing is of the utmost importance. Personally, I can read about almost any subject if I feel a basic trust in, and respect for, the writer. The voice must have authority. But more than that, I must know that the writer is all right. If she describes a suicide attempt or a babysitter's cruelty to her, or a time of acute loneliness, I need to feel that the writer, not the character who survived the experience, is in control of telling the story....The tone of such pieces may be serious, ironic, angry, sad, or almost anything except whiny. There must be no hidden plea for help - no subtle seeking of sympathy. The writer must have done her work, made her peace with the facts, and be telling the story for the story's sake. Although the writing may incidentally turn out to be another step in her recovery, that must not be her visible motivation: literary writing is not therapy. Her first allegiance must be to the telling of the story and I, as the reader, must feel that I'm in the hands of a competent writer who needs nothing from me except my attention.” - Judith Barrington

101. “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

102. “I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin” - Frank McCourt

103. “During these three months I have gone through much; I mean, I have gone through much in myself; and now there are the things I am going to see and go through. There will be much to be written.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

104. “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

105. “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

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

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

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

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

110. “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

111. “How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.” - Tracy Kidder

112. “Their promise, my children's possibilities, still linger in our home.” - Sonali Deraniyagala

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

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

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

116. “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

117. “Each person in the group said something except for me. My silence became noticed. About halfway through the meeting I started to think, I've got to talk. Today, I've got to talk. Fear racked me so bad that sweat ran down my sides. I thought, After the curly-haired woman stops talking I'll raise my hand. A man with a cocky smile told the curly woman that her story was nothing compared to his, he'd been passed out cold from heroin and God knows what, and I wanted to tell him to quit glorifying hinself. I was just about to say the words, a few faces turned toward me as if they could sense my imminent speech, when a man across the circle interrupted.The opportunity passed; what I wanted to say wouldn't fit now. I tilted on the back two legs of the chair and waited for my desire to speak and be noticed and be part of the group to travel back through my nervous system. Up the synapses condemnation rushed: Why couldn't I spit something out like a normal person?” - Daphne Scholinski

118. “I learned that being a mother takes a lot of energy.” - Julia Sweeney