Browse 1594 quotes about Memoir.
“The most difficult thing for me to translate to date, though, has been my own life (250).”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“We no longer had a lingua franca after we moved there. We consisted of six people, our own little Tower of Babel… Six people speaking many different languages, none of them mutually intelligible. Six people bumping into each other in the dark, no longer able to understand each other, wounding one other in the process (257).”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“I'm outside my parents' home in the aftermath of their deaths, waiting for my three siblings to arrive so we can go through it, room by room, object by object, memory by memory; decide what to keep, what to discard. Stepping out of my rental car, part of me feels like a trespasser now, while another part feels like I never left. (7)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“In addition to the physical aspects of the work, I'm here to recreate my own personal story, my own narrative. For years—a lifetime, really—when I thought about my life, I saw it through the lens of other people, usually my parents, sometimes my sib-lings. If they told me I was this, that, or the other type of person, I usually took their words at face value, even when the descriptions sounded negative, even when I fought their pronouncements. But translation is all about making decisions, hundreds, even thousands of decisions. Maybe a new way exists to look at myself, at my life. At long last, I’ll take those same words and events to come up with different meanings, different interpretations, ones I've reached on my own, stripping away others' interpretations of who I am. (9)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“I lead a completely different life than people close to me probably expected.”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“The translator in me--always at work, even in English-wants to understand the intent of his words. This is where the meaning must lie, right? With the filters turned off, the translator's mind is unfettered by others' words, actions, or opinions, or even by their mere presence. (15)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“Tell me who I am, I’d asked my parents in so many ways. (16)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“I feel powerless to make decisions about what should or shouldn’t be thrown out down here. (88)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“In my case, I felt like I'd been drowning in a sea of words, words that, more often than not, bore no resemblance to their dictionary definitions. What was the point of communicating if, inevitably, a subtext bubbled up, one I had trouble making sense of in my naïveté, in my confusion? What was the point if a word's meaning had been distorted to fit secret agendas, flip-flopped for unknown ulterior motives, withheld for other reasons? Translating what anyone said had become impossible for me, my work with languages, my love of words failing me when it came to my own family. All my dictionaries proved useless in trying to decipher a lifetime of communication fraught with subtexts buried beneath more subtexts. (134)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“Why did she keep these random items? How did they make the cut? Maybe she felt it had to be her decision what to keep, what to discard, just as it's my turn now, my decision as I go room to room, playing God with my parents' possessions. (148)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“When you're translating a document or a speech, if you don't have all the words, you don't have all the meaning. I'd only had my words thus far, my thoughts, not hers. That had given me an incomplete picture, one with pockets of omissions… (154)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“In my own way, maybe that's what I'm doing here, searching this home for anything that is evidence of my parents' love for me, for clues to the puzzle, translations of their behavior toward me. (156)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“For my part, I never knew who she’d be on any given day. Now that she’s gone, the mystery remains unsolved, part of my untranslatable life (161).”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“Once our reasons to be together—our parents, our childhood years—had been removed, not much linkage between us remained (181).”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“Until I was twenty, I thought I was responsible for her growing old.”
Source: A Woman's Story
“Maybe it’s not about having a beautiful day, but about finding beautiful moments. Maybe a whole day is just too much to ask. I could choose to believe that in every day, in all things, no matter how dark and ugly, there are shards of beauty if I look for them.”
Source: Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
“Some love stories don’t end because they failed, but because they taught us how to leave with our hearts still open.”
“Some types of growth are actually types of decay.”
Source: The Mourning Report
“I'm not ready to let 2014 go. It feels like letting Sam go. Yet I know that I have no choice. It's another day I don't know how to get through.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“I feel a hardness developing
around the softer parts
of me, something brittle
that won't let me cry. I don't
want to be brittle
but I don't want to feel
the pain either.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“I am glad to have had yesterday with its pain and joy. I am glad to have been able to feel it all.”
“Although life takes away it also continues
to give, if only we can allow it to.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“I have felt you in tumbling clouds, above my head, in early morning sunlight dancing on the bed.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“You are a song inside me now.
A melody that stirs or bursts
into life when I think of you.
I carry the pulse of you
within me.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“I feel a sharp stab of regret as I remember that I can’t share anything with him anymore.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“No one is there to require anything of me. I sit with my thoughts and, in my stillness, I become invisible...”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“I want to push it all away into a closed-off part of my mind where it can no longer trouble me.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“Things do still touch me. It surprises me, this capacity within me still to see and feel the beauty in life. I would have expected it to be snuffed out by sorrow.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“That's where I am now, caught between past and future.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“Now I know that lives tear too. Can they be re-sewn, re-configured, sides to middle, new strength found? Even if they can, I know I will always feel the tell-tale ridge down the centre, at the heart of me.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“I feel him in it; in the dappled sunlight dancing on the bed; in the branches swaying outside my bedroom window; in the leaves trembling in the breeze.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“Sadness seems to come in waves. Big rolling waves. I have no choice but to ride them.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“Silence falls for a moment. And then the evening continues, as it must.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“Life was never dull when you were around. It's going to be so quiet without you.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“I feel guilt and anger slip away as swiftly as the equatorial sun. And in their place comes sorrow.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“I know there is nothing to be gained in accumulating sticks with which to beat myself.”
Source: A Song Inside: A heartbreaking and uplifting memoir about love and loss
“When the road stretches long and dark and ragged, it’s sweetness that remains at the end of it.”
Source: Braver Than You Think: Around the World on the Trip of My (Mother’s) Lifetime
“Put simply, when I realised I could build a wall that would last hundreds of years, men wanting to fuck me felt a little irrelevant.”
Source: Drystone: A Life Rebuilt
“Then, I continue my journey where the wind takes the tears, and the miles soften the memories.”
Source: Riding Soul-O
“We're all sprinkled with crazy. Some of us are just better at hiding it.”
Source: The Drowners
“I wish I had this book when I was a kid--a book on a shelf that came from someone of this background and made me feel that my voice was relevant.”
Source: Brownsville Bred: Dreaming Out Loud
“Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), a Portuguese poet, writer, and philosopher said, ‘The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regrets over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“And of course that was an Amaryllis that was never going to exist, one that I could never talk to or thank. I longed for her, even though I only knew her through her words.”
“With the utmost love as our motivation, we sometimes think we are doing what is best for our children by protecting them from unpleasantness or cruelty. All we are really doing is shielding ourselves from owning up to misfortune or bad judgment.”
Source: Riding Soul-O
“Transparent tubes divided Phil’s blood into shades of red, fading to straw colored plasma. I watched his fluid swirl past his shoulders and disappear into machines. He offered himself to blood banks all over the city, his plasma rushed to hospitals where it would circulate through other people’s bodies. The map of my love’s tapped arteries would look like a bloodshot eye over the city of Albuquerque. His blood bought us dinner. I dreamed he was my mother, and I nursed his arm. I wrote a poem about it, how I suckled his arm dry like a sore teat.”
Source: Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes
“Everything was an excuse. The felt so concrete, so real at the time. Now they are wispy, pathetic. I was terrified. If I participated in the world I moved closer to, then I would have to stomach the chance that I might fail at every task I tackled.
I didn't want to fail at being Native. Being Native to me then meant not only having the experience of all of these cultural things, but also being decent at them. I wanted to feel a peace in myself that cultural things brought me, but I had never felt so out of my depth. Failure felt imminent.
But I couldn't fail at something I never had the chance to try. So the excuses continued to pour from me, sweetly apologetic to hide the stench of the rotting fear that created them.”
Source: Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity
“Her mother told her "When I didn't like someone of something about a person,it probably was something I didn't like about myself.”
Source: Bright Lights, Prairie Dust: Reflections on Life, Loss, and Love from Little House's Ma
“I no longer needed to peel myself of my skin, or to hide. To Dash the colorless ephemeral things that existed just beneath my surface were as vivid as the beauty marks he traced on my cheek.”
Source: Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
“...we receive so much from other writers when they show us how it’s done. When they position a character’s heart directly on the page for us, when they’re inventive in form or structure, or emotionally true in a way that feels radical in its familiarity. Or when their sentences are so crisp as to be nearly audible, like a piece of paper torn in two—all of this shows us how to do it ourselves, how it’s possible, but also it emboldens us, releases us from our fears about our own work. An encouragement by example. We learn from them, but also, they tell us we can. Without even knowing it. Enter here. Start here. Begin now. This is why it’s always important to be reading. This is why we must always chew on the words of others. It’s nutrition. Eat your dinner.”
“A real garden is what I would call a parcel of land - any size, anywhere, with any plants or no plants - that is loved and nurtured. It's a personal place, probably enclosed in some way, and imbued with a person's spirit, a gardener's spirit. I'm sure many people think being a gardener sounds like a horrible job. I think it's one of the most rewarding occupations anyone could have – I mean to physically make gardens, not just sit down and design one (let's leave that to the designers), and not just take care of grass and plants (maintenance workers can do that). To dedicate your entire being and all the passion and time and knowledge you have to working with plants and shaping them into a living, personal artwork. That's what a real gardener does, and that's why “half-gardener” is already a compliment.”
Source: Mezzo giardiniere