c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Choose this life. Choose this body. Say yes to all of it. Say yes to the beauty and the good and the ugly and the difficult. Choose what you have, what you are. Choose this moment. Choose to love and remember. You are full. You are alive.
— Kimber Simpkins, Full: How one woman found yoga, eased her inner hunger, and started loving herself
Do your parents know you’re here?' asked the lady at social Services. ‘No,’ I said, ‘but I want to know about children’s homes.’ I had to stand on my toes to see over the reception desk.
— Constance Briscoe, Ugly
You kids were all planned, you were just planned really, really quickly.
— Candace Allan, Text Me, Love Mom: Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest
[V]alue your dreams but . . . be wary of them also, . . . look for integrity in unusual places.
— Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
I always felt awkward and unfinished, unworthy of love, suspicious of affection offered. My mother's absence became a great presence in my life.
— Marilyn Sewell, Raw Faith: Following the Thread
Bonding through caregiving..I don't think I'd ever realized until then that so much affection, so much heart connect, happens when we take care of someone.
— Lindsey O'Connor, The Long Awakening, a memoir
This is why being broken is so beautiful: being broken means you have cracks for love and light to shine through, gaps for the Godiverse to burrow and bloom, space to move from who you are to who you will become.
— Reba Riley, Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome: A Memoir of Humor and Healing in 30 Religions
And I was cooking for three, and teaching, and taking care of a man who’d just collapsed in my house; learning to cook like June Cleaver didn’t exactly seem an option.
— Mark Doty, Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
I try to be perfect but I'm not. I'm perfectly imperfect in every way.
— James   Weston, My Rehab Diary
Your people understand the forest: how the animals behave, where to find them, and so on. I want something similar—but instead of the forest as a whole, I want to understand dragons. They are not only here, you know; there are dragons in the savannah—” Mekeesawa nodded. “Well, there are more than that, all over the world. They live in the mountains and on the plains and maybe even in the ocean. I want to know them as you know the creatures of this forest.”“But why?” Mekeesawa asked. His eyes were still merry with laughter, but his question was serious. “You don’t live in all those places.”With the amount of time I have spent traveling in my life, one might make the argument that I do live in all those places, if only temporarily. But Mekeesawa’s point was a good one, and not easily dismissed. The Moulish understood the creatures of the Green Hell because their survival depended on it; my survival did not depend on my traveling the globe to find dragons. (Indeed, it has on more than one occasion nearly been detrimental to my life expectancy.) How could I answer him?Thinking back on the matter now, it is possible my only true answer to that question is now in its second volume, with more to come. These memoirs are not only an accounting of my life; they are an accounting *for* it.
— Marie Brennan, The Tropic of Serpents
For friends' reviews, sample chapters and more pictures go to my website
— Leni Goodman
I applied at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard after my band broke up. I really wanted to work there because it involved the love of my life, music. It was also located on the world famous Sunset Strip, a place I dreamed of going to ever since I was a teenager in the 80's to become a rock star.
— K.D. Sanders
Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention...
— Wallace Stegner
This body needs me to say yes to it, just as it is right now. No more singing that same old jingle of body-shame and dieter's promised lands.
— Kimber Simpkins, Full: How one woman found yoga, eased her inner hunger, and started loving herself
In late 1949, at two and a half years old, I arrived in Jamaica for the first time. I had crossed the Atlantic by air from England. My Jamaican father was studying in London, my European mother was sick, and so in true Jamaican style I was sent home to my grandparents.
— Rachel Manley
Going to the seaside in winter is like seeing your partner first thing in the morning. Ugly, depressing and troubled by wind.
— Andy Leeks
You can only move if you are actually in the moment. You have to be where you are to get where you need to go.
— Amy Poehler, Yes Please
Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.
— Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir
At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world's and the psyche's hinterland.
— C.G. Jung
We look into our hearts and see objectivity
—  we look into our minds and see rationality
I read somewhere that a man should tell the story of his life at the age of forty, and this deadline is fast approaching as I write these lines, only a few short weeks remain before this ominous birthday arrives.
— Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling
I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. Evenings, I light the old lamps. There is no running water, and I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!
— C.G. Jung
These secrets are not secrets per se but are truths hidden from public view. I had to write this book. There had to be a reason I survived to tell this story.
— Rebecca Allard
We cannot honor those we have lost if we lose our minds. - Charmainism
— Charmaine Smith Ladd, Shake Hands with Yourself: A Peacemaker's Guide to Happiness & Inner Peace
I had lots of appointments, many places to go, and I needed a lot of rest; the art of constructively selling oneself requires much tender self-care
— Aphrodite Phoenix, Are They Bad Girls or Brilliant?: The Truths Behind the Fight for Independent Prostitutes' Rights
It is an empty room, that afterwards, a soledad, and it sits there at the center of a person's life and waits to be filled.
— Daisy Hernandez
Yvette is a woman who looks like a church bell. Her copper body curves with purpose, angles on a chair as if from a tower overlooking a village by the sea. Her bones are strong everywhere, in her cheeks, her shoulders, her hands. They are made from something more durable like iron or brass. When she smiles, it is as if a bell has been struck, as if music has entered the world the way God intended: at noon by the sea.
— Daisy Hernandez
First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert's been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her, I'm jumping on the canopied bed while she cries, she's pulling out drawers looking for a handkerchief, Now, he's all right, the man say, they think, patting her shoulder, I'm jumping higher, I'm not allowed, they think he saved old man Mayes, the bed slats dislodge and the mattress collapses. My mother lunges for me.Many traveled to Reidsville for the event, but my family did not witness Willis Barnes's electrocution, From kindergarten through high school, Donette, the murderer's daughter, was in my class. We played together at recess. Sometimes she'd spit on me.
— Frances Mayes, Under Magnolia: A Southern Memoir
How many humans over thousands of years have stood thus with their horses, seeing in them the lines of universal perfection, the majesty of grace and power, feeling stronger and more beautiful themselves for their contact with the magical power of such a steed? Such is the lure of the horse. In a world in which grace is neither synonymous nor usually compatible with power, the horse has remained an ancient symbol of strength and elegance, an icon of a majestic essence that exists far outside mere human beings. Because of the space that lies between us — only the cruelest amongst us ever truly conquers a horse — there is magic. “ — Margot Page
— Margot   Page
Interns, unite: you have nothing to lose but your unpaid positions!
— Piccolo Fortunato, Piccolo: An Intern's Tale
How could she have gotten herself here? To this place where she stood by while the man she adored checked out things to share with his wife? You knew what you were getting into. But that wasn’t really true. One never knew, not entirely, not until in really deep. She screamed and seethed in raw silence. Damien came in then, and spooned her. He hadn’t a clue she was an impulse away from getting up, dressing, and leaving. How shocked he would be, if she did that.  And he’d conclude that she wasn’t the well-matched true lover that he thought he had finally, at long last, discovered.  That thought ploughed a spike deeply through her. It gouged her so much that her breath stopped. It hurt her even more than did the wife. And she knew in that moment while he settled into bliss that she wasn’t going to leave, that leaving hadn’t had the slightest chance.
— Aphrodite Phoenix, And The Point of All this Agony is...?
You won’t be able to do this ten years from now—just leave everything behind and go.
— Rachel Kapelke-Dale, Graduates in Wonderland: The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults
It's only natural for people to fall, but there are people who, even if they fall, jump right back up right away and run forward, and there are people who just keep sitting there, crying.
— Ilchi Lee, The Call of Sedona: Journey of the Heart
The move away from writing poetry was gradual. It was a gentle slope into a muddy pond; it was a collection of choices. There was no one thing that took the pen from my hand. Life got in the way. Poetry was an elective. I elected to let it slip into the water. I elected to let my inner poet slide into that deep water and float there a long time, until at last I could no longer see her there drowning."-Nearly Orthodox
— Angela Doll Carlson
It's very kind of you to take us in," said the vicar, smiling. "We're so sorry if we've put you out at all." "Not at all!" I said, lying through my teeth.
— Victoria Twead, Two Old Fools in Spain Again
Gentleness is given to those who have learned that God will not have his kingdom triumph through the violence of the world, for such a triumph came through the meekness of a cross.
— Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir
Within that quiet little girl with no apparent needs lived a person with a great imagination. In that shell I lived and grew and planned, until there emerged a way to pull all the loose threads of my life together.
— A.R. Cecil, Journeys to Mother Love: Nine Women Tell Their Stories of Forgiveness & Healing
The vicar's handshake was warm and reassuring, but shaking hands with Mavis was like clutching a bunch of dead twigs.
— Victoria Twead, Two Old Fools in Spain Again
This book tells my story. I’m writing it in Ireland, in a house on a hillside. The house sits low in the landscape between a holy well and the site of an Iron Age dwelling. It was built of stones ploughed out of the fields by men who knew how to raise them with their hands and to lock one stone to the next so each was firm. It’s a lone house on the foothills of the last mountain on the Dingle peninsula, the westernmost point in mainland Europe. At night the sky curves above it like a dark bowl, studded with stars.…From the moment I crossed the mountain, I fell in love with the place, which was more beautiful than any I’d ever seen. And with a way of looking at life that was deeper, richer, and wiser than any I’d known before.
— Felicity Hayes-McCoy, The House on an Irish Hillside
Everyone has a colorful life. You just have to get out your crayons.
— Benay Nordby, The Full Ripened Grain, a Memoir of Healing and Hope
We had never eaten our own chickens but we delighted in eating their eggs. No matter how hot the summer became, they always presented us with eggs, which I thought was very generous of them, considering the heat. I'm sure I wouldn't have bothered.
— Victoria Twead, Two Old Fools in Spain Again
One thing I always admired about Daddy was the way he could bounce back from adversity. From the very beginning of his life, he’d had more than his share of broken dreams and disappointments. He lived through the Depression, a war, a couple of failed businesses and the deaths of two wives, but he always found a way to pick up the pieces and go on. When I’ve hit low points in my own life, I could hear his voice in the back of head saying, “Baby, you’ve got to roll with the punches.
— L.K. Campbell, The Life & Times of a Boomer Baby
Have I mentioned the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, and the collapse of a section of the Bay Bridge, or the Oakland ‘firestorm’ of 1991? No need. There are already there, in my narratives that fail to mention them, in my dreams that fail to represent them.
— Robert Appelbaum, Working the Aisles: A Life in Consumption
From one end to the other I have identified with various forms of spirituality. I was a Jew, then a God-hater. I was an atheist, then a Christian, for which I was called a traitor.
— April Voytko Kempler, The Altered I: Memoir of Joseph Kempler, Holocaust Survivor
Not to put too fine a point on it, if you want the dream, if you want to sculpt the magic inside your head and heart for real, if you want the recognition, if you want your true identity to be glowing, taking charge and fueling the electricity of life, instead of being stuck and feeling bad. If that’s what you want, you have to let go. By which I mean bolt crop the chains of old – and THAT was by far the hardest thing I’ve done.
— Annaliese Morgan, Breaking chains
We human beings are at once delicate and intricate and temporal like the tulips in an April field and sturdy, resilient and enduring as Mt. Rainier when the will inspires us. We are individual miracles, those who live in vegetative states and those who wait with them
— Benay Nordby, The Full Ripened Grain, a Memoir of Healing and Hope
Let us call the world to come together – every child, every woman and every man. Letus draw a bigger picture, one that enters every home, every heart and brings togetherevery voice.Let us listen to the helpless cries of the abused and neglected children. Let us listenmore deeply to women who are being abused, blamed and discriminated against, whiletrapped in cages of injustice, fear and shame, with no option but to suffer in silence.I have seen with my own eyes the happiest dreams of unfortunate victims change totheir worst nightmares. I have seen their lives shatter while their families fall apart.Their hearts have burned and their eyes have seen nothing but misery.Let us transform all the voices and sounds of hopelessness into a beautiful melody thatplays to the world. No matter how dark things get, the sun of justice will eventually rise.The birds will sing our stories to the world. Rainbows will dazzle with color in a skythat is no longer grey.
— Maha Al Fahim, Born a Gangster's Daughter: My Mother's Story
Yet you stand, too ashamed to run, too fearful to embrace. God I see so much ofwhat I love in that face.
— Suenammi Richards, Perilous Flight
I journeyed alone for almost ten years before I found home. Adoptions are like very delicate gardening with transplants and grafts. Mine took hold, rooted, and bloomed, even though there were inevitable adjustments to the new soil and climate. Yet I have not forgotten where my roots started.
— Ashley Rhodes-Courter, Three Little Words: A Memoir
The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
The purpose of my life is not to get what I want. The purpose of my life is to become who I am.
— Cara Lopez Lee, They Only Eat Their Husbands
Hey everyone. This is Elizabeth Stone, the one who wrote a A BOY I ONCE KNEW and BLACK SHEEP AND KISSING COUSINS. To those of you who read either one, thanks! But another Elizabeth Stone, not me, wrote WOMEN AND THE CUBAN REVOLUTION and VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. Just setting the record straight!
— Elizabeth Stone
A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things—how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver—and this inability enhanced my oppression.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.
— Gillian Marchenko, Sun Shine Down: A Memoir
There is an element of selfishness to this, I suppose. It feels pretty good to be able to so quickly help someone. That is, after all, one of the great emotional payoffs of medicine. That isn't to say that ECT is either a panacea or without flaws - but when used in the right way for the right purposes it's of great benefit, and condemning it because it isn't perfect would lead to more suffering and harm, no less.It was one of the most difficult things I have ever done in my life. I have memory problems as a residual of it; however, I'm alive. That was the main point.
— Kitty Dukakis, Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy
My words to Anna, as we stood contemplating the Scuola Grande di San Marco, moments before entering Venice Hospital, came true: 'With a façade like that, I could even accept having a deformed child.' I accepted Tito's cerebral palsy.I accepted it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I accepted it with delight. I accepted it with enthusiasm. I accepted it with love.
— Diogo Mainardi, The Fall: A Father's Memoir in 424 Steps
When Tito was born, I was writing my fifth novel. That was how I saw my future: living in Venice and jumping from novel to novel. Tito's birth changed all that.
— Diogo Mainardi, The Fall: A Father's Memoir in 424 Steps
It is a fundamental misperception," Fouts says to me, "to think human life has more value than any other life form.
— Lauren Slater, The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals
[My father] was handsome and tanned and smelled wonderful, like a mix of the ocean and fresh-cut grass, except when he smoked his pipe, which also smelled wonderful, as how I thought wisdom must smell, when it curls about your head.
— Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford
There is an element of selfishness to this, I suppose. It feels pretty good to be able to so quickly help someone. That is, after all, one of the great emotional payoffs of medicine. That isn't to say that ECT is either a panacea or without flaws - but when used in the right way for the right purposes it's of great benefit, and condemning it because it isn't perfect would lead to more suffering and harm, no less.
— Kitty Dukakis, Shock: The Healing Power of Electroconvulsive Therapy
Despite your delusions to the contrary, swingers, by and large, are a civilized lot. We come in all ages, shapes, sizes, nationalities, and ethnicities. We have differing beliefs, varying opinions, IQs, and senses of humor. We have families, friends, careers, hobbies, mortgages, and retirement plans. In short, we’re just like everyone else. We don’t strap on leather chaps and nipple clamps to go about our day. Wearing kinks on our sleeves like badges of honor isn’t our style. Truth be told, we don’t talk that much about our dalliances—-at least not to Vanilla folk. We’re not ashamed. We simply assume most of the world doesn’t get our way of life. And more times than not, we’re right.
— Daniel   Stern, Swingland: Between the Sheets of the Secretive, Sometimes Messy, but Always Adventurous Swinging Lifestyle
When I’d RSVPed for tonight, I hadn’t expected to be the youngest by three-plus decades. To be honest, I hadn’t expected anything. I didn’t have the mental capacity. The excitement over my first house party overwhelmed me and kept my thoughts abuzz for threeweeks.Jim and Valerie suggested Harry and Jackie invite me. Understandably, Harry and Jackie were skeptical about bringing a single male into their close-knit group, but Valerie vouched for me, which persuaded Jackie. I leapt at the invitation—any single male would have—but now, learning about the most recent medications to assist smooth menopausal transition, I was seriously rethinking my decision.
— Daniel   Stern, Swingland: Between the Sheets of the Secretive, Sometimes Messy, but Always Adventurous Swinging Lifestyle
I’m no expert, no natural-born talent, definitely no guru. As you’ll soon learn, only through a colossal experiment in trial and error did I reach the sexual summit. Although I own up to having worn a cape in a few intimate scenarios, I don’t possess supernatural powers of any kind. Perhaps my IQ is slightly above average, but Mensa isn’t busting down my door. If pressed to define myself, I’d say I’m Horatio Alger between the sheets: a self-made swinging single male. . . with a hefty dose of Buster Keaton mixed in.
— Daniel   Stern, Swingland: Between the Sheets of the Secretive, Sometimes Messy, but Always Adventurous Swinging Lifestyle
I dozed, jolting occasionally at the driver's loud pronouncement of upcoming stops. At this early hour the bus hummed along quietly with few passengers, so the stops were infrequent. In the hazy surrealism of predawn, there really was not much to see--what I could make out was mainly countryside, though not what I would call quaint, and certainly no Shakespearean cottages or fairy folk peeping from the trees.
— Carolyn Weber, Surprised by Oxford
After consciously enduring a twelve-inch knitting needle navigated into the unseen recesses of my pelvis and almost passing out at the sensation of my hip inflating with fluid and somehow clinging to my sanity through the hour-long, migraine-inducing blare of the imaging contraption, which resembled a compact wind tunnel, possessed the amplification capability of a Marshall stack, and pushed my patience beyond the limits of superhuman endurance, I wasinformed by my orthopedist that the image of my still-smoldering hip had revealed, and I quote, “just a little inflammation.” In the world of orthopedic medicine, “a little inflammation” apparently qualifies as sound diagnosis.
— Daniel   Stern, Swingland: Between the Sheets of the Secretive, Sometimes Messy, but Always Adventurous Swinging Lifestyle
How long you guys been renovating?” Craig asked Arianna.“About a month.”“How much longer?”Arianna sighed. “The contractor messed up the counters, so who knows.”“Preaching to the choir.”“Yeah?”“Oh, yeah. But in the end everything turned out for the best.”“How so?”“Well, for one, I switched from laminate to granite.”“Granite . . .” She exhaled, confounded, as if the granite countertop quandary was the most perplexing philosophical question of all time. “Yeah . . .We’re torn.”“More expensive, but aesthetically superior,” Craig lobbied. “Also retains value longer.”Knowing the sexual perversity about to transpire, I couldn’t reconcile that I was suddenly in an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Granted, I didn’t know from normal pre–group sex discussion topics, but I was pretty sure home improvement wasn’t on the list.
— Daniel   Stern, Swingland: Between the Sheets of the Secretive, Sometimes Messy, but Always Adventurous Swinging Lifestyle
I didn’t make choices based on what I liked or didn’t like. I simply accepted what they chose for me. My role had always been to react and adapt to what was decided by other people, by outside circumstances, or in my mind, by God. My voice went unheard in my own life.
— Jonna Ivin, Will Love For Crumbs
Sex is not love and love is not sex
— Lizelle DuPlessis
The selection process is simple. Hubby exhausts every ploy in his psychological arsenal to filter out the liars, fakes, and undesirables. (If only every husband were so devoted . . .) Me, I try to prove to that I’m not the stereotypical single male. That I’m in the Lifestyle for the right reasons. That I’m courteous and respectful. All of which are true, but the burden of proof is onme. It always is.
— Daniel   Stern, Swingland: Between the Sheets of the Secretive, Sometimes Messy, but Always Adventurous Swinging Lifestyle
Wilds whisper, yet I long for their roar.
— Gin Getz, The Color of the Wild
His eyes are so clear and blue that nothing but clichés enter my mind.
— Augusten Burroughs, Dry
His laugh is made of porch swings and lemonade.
— Augusten Burroughs, Dry
Truth: last week I online shopped too much. Then I ate 2 pounds of jelly beans to feel better about that. In fact, while I was trying to read soul-nourishing things all I could think about was shopping and jellybeans. Points to the monkey mind.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
BARRY GIFFORD, Author of "Wild at Heart" on DANGEROUS ODDS by Marisa Lankester:"Marisa Lankester's unique chronicle of high crimes and low company is as wild a ride as any reader is likely to be taken on. She was the lone woman in the eye of a predatory hurricane that blew across continents and devastated countless lives. That she survived is testament to her brains and bravery. The old-timers who invented violence as a second language contended that nothing is deadlier than the female, to cross her was to buck dangerous odds, and this book tells you why." Film "Wild at Heart" won Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Film by David Lynch
— Barry Gifford
I guess this means we're uck-fayed, don't it Mikee?
— Michael Jay, Dog Water Free, A Memoir: A coming-of-age story about an improbable journey to find emotional truth
.. And now it was official: I loved REI more than I loved the people behind Snapple lemonade.
— Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Fortunately the Omanis are generally very friendly and in no time at all, I had a knight in shining white dishdasha offering to help me.
— Charlotte  Smith, Paw Prints In Oman: Dogs, Mogs and Me
The selection process is simple. Hubby exhausts every ploy in his psychological arsenal to filter out the liars, fakes, and undesirables. (If only every husband were so devoted . . .) Me, I try to prove that I’m not the stereotypical single male. That I’m in the Lifestyle for the right reasons. That I’m courteous and respectful. All of which are true, but the burden of proof is onme. It always is.
— Daniel Stern
See, far above arrogance and selfishness on the rankings of undesirable Lifestyle traits, topping the lengthy list of carnal sins, occupying its very own stratosphere of unforgivablereprehensibility, is lying. Without question, fibbing is the fastest way to secure a one-way trip to blackball status in the swing community. So assured is a liar’s exile from the Lifestyle that should a perjurer come clean about a material untruth and still secure playtime, that individual will have rewritten the entire swing rulebook. And no matter how enticing it may be to rewrite history, I do not recommend attempting it. Not unless you’re lusting after a celibate existence.
— Daniel   Stern, Swingland: Between the Sheets of the Secretive, Sometimes Messy, but Always Adventurous Swinging Lifestyle
I’ve written for those who want to learn, truly learn, about a community with which they aren’t familiar. Or for those who have preconceptions but can admit they may not be entirely accurate (and, in some cases, that they are completely wrong). This means my reader must possess an open mind and a certain level of curiosity. If that’s you, proceed to checkout. An uncensored glimpse behind the curtain, hairy backs and all, awaits.
— Daniel   Stern, Swingland: Between the Sheets of the Secretive, Sometimes Messy, but Always Adventurous Swinging Lifestyle
Every day is a new beginning, the building of a habit. Every action is a step in some direction. There is no pause in living.
— Anna White, Mended: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Leaps of Faith
FROM a six-year-old: Told by a well-meaning friend, ‘Alex, do you know what the one thing is that the more you give, the more you get back? It’s love, Alex.’To which Alex asked, ‘What about pain?
— Susan   Hamilton, Hit Woman
If variety is the spice of life, then my life must be one of the spiciest you ever heard of. A curry of a life. -Paul Child
— Julia Child, My Life in France
ceremony is essential to humans: It's a circle that we draw around important events to separate the momentous from the ordinary. And ritual is a sort of magical safety harness that guides us from one stage of our lives into the next, making sure we don't stumble or lose ourselves along the way. Ceremony and ritual march us carefully right through the center of our deepest fears about change…
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
...The more I learned the more I realized how very much one has to know before one is in-the-know at all.
— Julia Child, My Life in France
Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family's history.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means 'two,' and the word zweifel, which means 'doubt' - suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life's journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers - always measuring our lives against some other person's life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
The Buddha taught that most problems - if only you give them enough time and space - will eventually wear themselves out.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
And some people have less star appeal than others, but sometimes they shine far brighter than those with more.
— Mickey Leigh, I Slept With Joey Ramone
I discovered that when one follows the artist's eye one sees unexpected treasures in so many seemingly ordinary scenes.
— Julia Child, My Life in France
All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life without having babies.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
From the moment I was first pregnant, and those around me insisted that treats such as cold cuts and nail polish could cut my unborn child's potential IQ in half, I got into the habit of NOT seeking out the little things that brought me joy. Like soft cheese. And getting too close to a Starbucks.Then my son came, and I was too busy crying while searching for his User Manual to consider a manicure or massage.I lasted about a week as a new mom before reaching out to others in my situation online. As exhausted, cranky, and confused as I was, I needed friends. It didn't take long for this gaggle of desperate, sleepless women to meet up in person...
— Kim Bongiorno, I Just Want to Pee Alone: A Collection of Humorous Essays by Kick Ass Mom Bloggers
The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning, and the same ending.
— Martin Amis, Experience: A Memoir
In France, Paul explained, good cooking was regarded as a combination of national sport and high art, and wine was always served with lunch and dinner. "The trick is moderation," he said.
— Julia Child, My Life in France
Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the "Wait-a-Minute Moment" - that pivotal instant when girls from traditional cultures start pondering what's in it for them, exactly, to be getting married at the age of thirteen and starting to have babies not long after. They start wondering if they might prefer to make different choices for themselves, or any choices, for that matter. Once girls from closed societies start thinking such thoughts, all hell breaks loose.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
The world is full of broken people who think they are surrounded by whole people.
— Greg Garrett, Crossing Myself: A Story of Spiritual Rebirth
I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes 'a family unit' to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of these big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
...Having felt the piercing gash of grief and lived through it, having loved to the brink of brokenness, and having learned the difference between friendship and frivolity, one eventually takes a conscious step through the invisible membrane that separates hubris from humility...
— Eldonna Edwards, Lost in Transplantation: Memoir of an Unconventional Organ Donor
I wear the word victim like a badge of honor — my own purple heart. I see what others do more than I see what I'm capable of.
— Mary E. DeMuth, Thin Places: A Memoir
It was becoming evident to many that while evil grows all by itself, good can be achieved only through hard struggle and maintained only through tireless effort, ..
— Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968
Our stories are mirrors. We can look into them and return to ourselves. We can make of them an offering.
— Jane Davenport Platko, In the Tracks of the Unseen; Memoirs of a Jungian Psychoanalyst
There was no better path to autonomy for an ambitious young businesswoman than to be married off to a respectable corpse.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and cleanly delineated from our realities as possible, and that sometimes it can take years of effort to reach such a point of sober discernment.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
I'll enjoy today while it's here, using the time wisely. Each day is a gift that soon becomes a memory.
— Lina Rehal, Carousel Kisses
He wasn't a great man, but he had a great life.
— Jeffrey Rasley, Light in the Mountains -- A Hoosier Quaker Finds Communal Enlightenment in Nepal
Everything I write is a rebound.
— Stuart Stutzman, Marginally Fictitious: A Literary Mixtape
How many people have I heard claim their children as the greatest accomplishment and comfort of their lives? It's the thing they can always lean on during a metaphysical crisis, or a moment of doubt about their relevancy - If I have done nothing else in this life, then at least I have raised my children well.But what if, either by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this comforting cycle of family and continuity? What if you step out? Where do you sit at the reunion? How do you mark time's passage without the fear that you've just fritted away your time on earth without being relevant? You'll need to find another purpose, another measure by which to judge whether or not you have been a successful human being. I love children, but what if I don't have any? What kind of person does that make me?Virginia Woolf wrote, "Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword." On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where "all is correct." But on the other side of that sword, if you're crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, "all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course." Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Sometimes you don’t get a second chance. You need to take a chance when you have the opportunity. Always.
— Gavin MacLeod, This Is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith and Life
Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.
— Mary Karr, Lit
In the process of my evolution, I became a victim of domestic war, an emotional casualty for a major portion of my life, entwined, entrapped and emotionally involved, until I learned how to become free. Sara Niles Torn From the Inside Out
— Sara Niles
Audrey Hepburn, as famous as she was, packed her own suitcases... I don’t know why that struck me, but it did. 'She has a servant’s heart,' I thought.
— Gavin MacLeod, This Is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith and Life
Answering the question 'How would you like to smell?' by saying 'I'd rather I didn't' is also no longer acceptable. It's not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic pot too - it's seen as almost un-feminist not to. What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations - millennia - to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone.
— David Mitchell
These memories are part of my heritage, the fabric of my personality, and as real to me as the land itself.
— Karen Jones Gowen, Farm Girl
The Grim Reaper isn't grim at all; he's a life-saver. He isn't grim because he isn't anything. . . . he is nothing. And nothing is a hell of a lot better than anything. So long, boys.
— Jack Kerouac
Everyone's a knucklehead at one point or another.
— Raymond F. Jones
I had never read a book written by an African-American. I didn't know that black people could write books. I didn't know that blacks had done any great things. I was always conscious of my inferiority and I always remembered my place - until the Civil Rights Movement came to the town where I was born and grew up.
— Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta: A Memoir
I had enough of a story churning in my head that combined all the elements of the day—the interview, the concert, the after-party’s private session—when he put his guitar away and asked me if I had ever experimented with homosexuality. Talk about unexpected segues. Letting him know that I had not and wasn’t about to, I successfully changed the subject by asking him to give me a condensed account about traveling to Mississippi in search of Bukka White.
— Kenny Weissberg, Off My Rocker: One Man’s Tasty, Twisted, Star-Studded Quest for Everlasting Music
I Have Fought the Good Fight and Won
— Carmen J. Viglucci
Mary [Tyler Moore] was absolutely brilliant... She is a fabulous actress. She can do anything.
— Gavin MacLeod, This Is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith and Life
How many pages will it take to tell your story?
— Ashly Lorenzana
If I can do it, anybody can do it. Willpower is strong! I believe that. You just have to have faith in yourself—and God—and make sure you know where your priorities stand.
— Gavin MacLeod, This Is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith and Life
Sherry Carroll is a real life Penny Lane and one wonders if she hasn't got Cameron Crowe or Lester Bangs hidden somewhere in her suburban basement.
— Maria Waters
A vow is a heavenly created obligation in motion that only ends when fully completed.
— Lizelle DuPlessis
While some people are good at painting, playing an instrument or singing, I have been told more than once I am good at storytelling. I hope that you enjoy my stories as I recall them.
— Eric Arrouze, A Gourmand in Training
I encourage anyone who has gone through hardships to look back through their life’s chapters and see what can be turned into a book. For you never know what heartache God, one day, can turn into a redemptive story.
— Jolina Petersheim
I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow "transcend" the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger
— Mary Karr, The Liars' Club
And even though people like to furrow their brow like they suspect you're not being honest about yourself, the truth is that they worry that you're not serving their idea of you.
— Ahmir Questlove Thompson, Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove
Success is not due to spontaneous combustion. You have to set yourself on fire.
— Various attributed sources
It was too much happiness. Happiness puts you at too much risk - what if you were to lose it? Too much happiness is a paradox. It's a tragedy, even: getting something you've always wanted but being unable to keep it.
— Jowita Bydlowska, Drunk Mom
Tempting as it may be to draw one conclusion or another from my story and universalize it to apply to another's experience, it is not my intention for my book to be seen as some sort of cookie-cutter approach and explanation of mental illness, It is not ab advocacy of any particular form of therapy over another. Nor is it meant to take sides in the legitimate and necessary debate within the mental health profession if which treatments are most effective for this or any other mental illness.            What it is, I hope, is a way for readers to get a true feel for what it's like to be in the grips of mental illness and what it's like to strive for recovery.
— Rachel Reiland, Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder
autism is more like retina patterns than measles
— Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism
Those who are close to us, when they die, divide our world. There is the world of the living, which we finally, in one way or another, succumb to, and then there is the domain of the dead that, like an imaginary friend (or foe) or a secret concubine, constantly beckons, reminding us of our loss. What is memory but a ghost that lurks at the corners of the mind, interrupting our normal course of life, disrupting our sleep in order to remind us of some acute pain or pleasure, something silenced or ignored? We miss not only their presence, or how they felt about us, but ultimately how they allowed us to feel about ourselves or them. (prologue)
— Azar Nafisi, Things I've Been Silent About: Memories
There's this parallel, perhaps less conscious desire, which is to numb myself to the world. To deal with the world tomorrow. Living is difficult. Dying is difficult.
— Jowita Bydlowska, Drunk Mom: A Memoir
Doing a geographic” is a term alcoholics often use for acting on the impulse to start over by moving to a new town, or state, instead of making any internal changes. It’s the anywhere-but-here part of the disease that says, “Remove yourself from this, go someplace new, and everything will be better.” Two years into our Florida stint, my mother pulled a geographic as radical as the move from Rochester. The new plan was to head for California. She enrolled in the mathematics graduate program at the University of California’s shiny new campus in San Diego, and as soon as our elementary school let out for the summer, she put us into a new Buick station wagon – a gift from her parents – and drove us across the country. You’d think we’d have protested at yet another move. After all, having been duped before, we were in no position to believe that the next move would be any different. But I have no memory of being unhappy about the news. Because that’s what often happens when an alcoholic parent is doing a geographic. She pulls you in and, before you know it, you, too, believe in the promise of the new place.
— Katie  Hafner, Mother Daughter Me
The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.
— David Sedaris, Naked
I usually enjoy setting up a new kitchen, but this has become a joyless and highly charged task. My mother and I each have our own set of kitchen boxes, which means that if there are two cheese graters between us, only one will make it into a cupboard. The other will be put back in a box or given to Goodwill. Each such little decision has the weight of a Middle East negotiation. While her kitchenware is serviceable, I’m a sucker for the high end: All-Clad saucepans and Emile Henry pie dishes. Before long, I’m shaking my head at pretty much everything my mother removes from her San Diego boxes. She takes each rejected item as a personal slight – which in fact it is. I begrudge her even her lightweight bowls, which she can lift easily with her injured hand. Here she is, a fragile old woman barely able to bend down as she peers into a low cupboard, looking for a place where she can share life with her grown daughter. At such a sight my heart should be big, but it’s small, so small that when I see her start stuffing her serving spoons into the same drawer as my own sturdy pieces, lovingly accumulated over the years, it makes me crazy. Suddenly I’m acting out decades of unvoiced anger about my mother’s parenting, which seems to be materializing in the form of her makeshift collection of kitchenware being unpacked into my drawers. When I became a mother myself, I developed a self-righteous sense of superiority to my mother: I was better than my mother, for having successfully picked myself up and dusted myself off, for never having lain in bed for days on end, too blotto to get my child off to school or even to know if it was a school day. By sheer force of will and strength of character, I believed, I had risen above all that she succumbed to and skirted all that I might have inherited. This, of course, is too obnoxiously smug to say in words. So I say it with flatware.
— Katie  Hafner, Mother Daughter Me
I know of other mothers who have children with disabilities,and right away they loved them and decided to ﬁght for them.That isn’t my story.
— Gillian Marchenko, Sun Shine Down: A Memoir
That's the thing about social drinking: In the end, it's the drinking that creates the scene, not the other way around. You grow to relish the buzz, regardless of the situation. Once you're there, really there inside that moment, with its neighbourly warmth and conversation, it's hard to tell what's responsible for producing emotion. What's responsible for the light-headed feeling? Is it the Molson, or the boy who's running his fingers through the ends of your hair? Are you chatty because you're drunk, or because you're connecting with someone on a level that you have never before experienced?
— Koren Zailckas, Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood
This, I suspect, is the territory that lies just ahead and around the curve of today. A place where loss grows more familiar, where joy is harmonized by sorrow, where endings outnumber beginnings, and where kindness becomes a sacrament.
— Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment