44 Memorable Memoir Quotes

Memoirs provide an intimate glimpse into the lives of others, offering stories brimming with wisdom, emotion, and insight. As we navigate our own journeys, these narratives can be both a mirror and a guide, reflecting our own experiences while lighting the path ahead. In this post, we've curated a collection of the top 44 memorable memoir quotes that capture the essence of human experience, resilience, and growth. Each quote serves as a testament to the power of storytelling, and the transformative impact it can have on both the reader and the writer. Prepare to be inspired, challenged, and moved by the words of those who have opened their hearts and shared their journeys with the world.

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

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

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

6. “Unbefuckinglievable.” - Toby Young

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

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

11. “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

12. “If you can see it, you can achieve it. God helps those who helps themselves. Power is in the act of humility.” - Patricia Amis

13. “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.” - Tina Fey

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

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

16. “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

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

18. “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

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

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “One thing I've noticed since I quit drinking is that a person usually has two or three sets of impulses scratching away at some internal door at any given time. If you're sober--if you're alert, and paying attention to those impulses, and not yielding to the instinct to anesthetize them--you can receive a lot of guidance about where to go, what to do next in life.” - Caroline Knapp

30. “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

31. “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

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

33. “...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

34. “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.” - Peter Trachtenberg

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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “This memoir is one of the most brutally honest books I’ve ever read. You will grow to believe, and cheer on, this flawed hero as he gains a liberating knowledge of himself.” - Joe Loya

39. “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

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

41. “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

42. “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

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

44. “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