71 Inspiring Memoir Quotes

Memoirs offer a unique glimpse into the lives and minds of individuals who have experienced fascinating journeys and profound transformations. These personal narratives not only tell captivating stories but also reveal universal truths that resonate with readers, inspiring them to reflect, grow, and connect. In this collection of 71 inspiring memoir quotes, we've gathered insights from a diverse array of voices, each offering their own perspective on the human experience. Whether you're seeking motivation, comfort, or a fresh outlook, these quotes are sure to spark inspiration and provide a deeper understanding of life's complexities. Dive in and explore the wisdom these extraordinary lives have to offer.

1. “Sometimes I feel she hasn't left...especially when I wear the photo charm necklace with her picture in it. I can't tell you how many young men have stared into that picture and the reaction is always the same: a slow beam rises across their faces and they want to know all about her. They become entranced the way Dana Andrews did when he first saw Gene Tierney's portrait in "Laura." I know Maria finds all of this quite amusing; why shouldn't she? 'Laura' is her middle name.” - Pamela Palmer Mutino

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

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

4. “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

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

6. “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

7. “...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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.” - Koren Zailckas

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

20. “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

21. “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

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

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

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

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

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 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

28. “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

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

30. “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

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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

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

39. “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

40. “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

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

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

43. “There is a place for what my heart tells me about you, and there is no shame or guilt in it. God Himself is free to look in my heart right this instant and I know He would not shame or admonish me about what He would see there because the pure, ego-less truth of how I hold you in my heart deserves to be kept alive.” - Mark Fiore

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

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

46. “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

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

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

49. “...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

50. “As an adult, getting paid thousands of dollars a week to say, “Aye, Sir. Course laid in” is a seriously sweet gig, but when I was a teenager, it sucked.” - Wil Wheaton

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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it. If you won the Irish Sweepstakes and bought a house that needed furniture would you fill it with bits and pieces of rubbish? Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish from the cinemas, it will rot in your head. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.” - Frank McCourt

55. “Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.” - Mary Karr

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

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

63. “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

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

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

66. “Everything around me affirmed there was nothing else I could do – yet everything inside me cried that I was not doing enough.” - Jason Najum

67. “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

68. “We're human. We all occasionally wet ourselves. No one is really better than anyone else. We're just all trying to make it through the year as best we can. We screw up sometimes. We succeed sometimes. We laugh. We cry. We go on. Those are the things we should really share with each other this holiday season, right, if we dare send a letter? We should share the truth. We should share the insanity.” - Wade Rouse

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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