c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Tomorrow! How sweet its prospects for a drunkard the night before. There is no better word. Before the earth hurls itself into sunshine, nothing is not possible.
— Mary Karr, Lit
But it's a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go.
— Mary Karr
It's hard to be an articulate ghost.
— Mary Karr, Lit
Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation.
— Mary Karr, Lit
Two years before our arrival at Maplehurst, we had left the Midwest eager for new jobs, milder weather, and a house of our own with a real backyard. We were unprepared for the enormity of our losses. Good friends. Close-knit community. A meaningful connection with the work of our minds and our hands.There was one lost thing, in particular. It was such a natural part of our prewilderness lives that I only ever recognized it after it was gone. In our northern city, we had lived a seasonal rhythm of summer festivals and winter sledding, spring baseball games and autumn apple picking. Our moments and our months were distinguished by the color of the trees, deep red or spring green, and the color of the lake, sparkling and playful in summer, menacing and dull in winter.These things were the beautiful, sometimes harsh, but always rhythmic backdrop in our days. Time was like music. It had a melody. In the wilderness, the only thing that differentiated one season from the next was my terrible winter asthma. Without time's music, I became aimless and disconnected, like a child's lost balloon.
— Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons
They took to walking and chatting in a park close to the house. Charles was flattered by the attention he was given by Edina. He had never had a girlfriend and smiled at the eagerness of this blossoming young woman. One evening, as they walked in the park. Charles took Edina's hand in his, and immediately the fire in his belly was lit."So, what is it you want to do, Edina?
— Barbara   Warren, Everlasting Lies
I have tried to fight the impulse, the attraction, but my defenses crumble every time I see him. Since my divorce from Hank I'm practically love-starved.
— Martha Lemasters, The Step: One Woman's Journey to Finding Her Own Happiness and Success During the Apollo Space Program
Pain engraves a deeper memory.
— Anne Sexton
Men ought to be a four-letter word! Menn!
— Becky Lewellen Povich, From Pigtails to Chin Hairs: A Memoir & More
Don't you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?""Wouldn't it be great if it did?" I said. Lucy and I both felt that life wasn't about avoiding suffering.
— Paul Kalanithi
I think of the friendships I've strained, the generosity I've exploited, the bridges I've torched. Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil; with them, forgive yourself. There may be hope for me yet.
— Anthony Ervin
What if you had such severe schizophrenia that your life was just one hallucination after another? And what if people kept trying to drag you back out of those hallucinations, to prove that you weren't living in reality and that reality was nothing more than a psych hospital? Would you go?
— Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia
The bassist -- always the bassist.
— Rob Sheffield
If we are lucky enough, as I am, to be from time to time in quite close contact with young people, they can sometimes make it easier to hang on to this notion when they function, as every person does vis-a-vis every other person they come up against, as a mirror. Always we are being reflected in the eyes of others. Are we silly or sensible, stupid or clever, bad or good, unattractive or sexy...? We never stop being at least slightly aware of, if not actively searching for, answers to such questions, and are either deflated or elated, in extreme cases ruined or saved, by what we get. So if when you are old a beloved child happens to look at you as if he or she thinks (even if mistakenly!) that you are wise and kind: what a blessing! It's not that such a fleeting glimpse of yourself can convert you into wiseness and kindness in any enduring way; more like a good session of reflexology which, although it can cure nothing, does make you feel like a better person while it's going on and for an hour or two afterwards, and even that is well worth having. The more frequent such shots of self-esteem are, the more valuable they become, so there is a risk - remote, but possible - of their becoming addictive. An old person who doesn't enjoy having young people in her life must be a curmudgeon, but it is extremely important that she should remember that risk and watch her step. Or he, his.
— Diana Athill
Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells us his story, I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differentials calculus. It was exalting to search and find, or create, the right word, that is, commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least clutter.
— Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
Look at what I wrote at the beginning of this memoir. Have I caught anything at all of the extraordinary night when Paul Dempster was born? I am pretty sure that my little sketch of Percy Boyd Staunton is accurate, but what about myself? I have always sneered at autobiographies and memoirs in which the writer appears at the beginning as a charming, knowing little fellow, possessed of insights and perceptions beyond his years, yet offering these with false naivete to the reader, as though to say, 'What a little wonder I was, but All Boy.' Have the writers any notion or true collection of what a boy is?I have and I have reinforced it by forty-five years of teaching boys. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man. Oh these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots' oaths!Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man's idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try. And to begin I must give you some notion of the village in which Percy Boyd Staunton and Paul Dempster and I were born.
— Robertson Davies, Fifth Business
We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts
— C.S. Lewis
You cannot go poking skeletons in the closet without making maggots wriggle." - Springfield Road
— Salena Godden, Springfield Road
Perhaps there is to be found in Pastrana the key to something which happens in Spain more frequently than is necessary. Past splendor overwhelms and in the end exhausts the people's will; and without force of will, as can be seen in so many cases, by being exclusively occupied with the contemplation of the glories of the past, they leave current problems unsolved. When the belly is empty and the mind filled with golden memories, the golden memories continually retreat and at last, though no one goes so far as to admit it, there is even doubt whether they ever existed and there is nothing left of them but a benevolent and useless cultural residue.
— Camilo José Cela
Debbie Downer" was one of the few sketches where I broke, and I remember watching Heratio Sanz laugh so hard that tears squirted out of his eyes. I still believe that sketch may be a cure for low-level depression if watched regularly.
— Amy Poehler
Hollywood Rule:RULE #1: You only need a license to do three things in the film business: blow up a building, wash someone’s hair, or drive a truck. You need no license, certification, documentation, or, for that matter, any filmmaking experience to be a writer, producer, director, actor, or even a studio executive. All you need is money.
— David Marder
I hope to offer the personal as a way to connect to the universal, not a claim for one universal experience of having breasts, but a universal hope for kindness—to each other and our selves and our bodies.
— Ruth Daniell
The Air Force was confused about what it wanted me to be when I grew up. I applied for an ROTC scholarship out of high school because I wanted to be an astronaut. None of my teachers had ever broken the news to me that I couldn’t fly into space, so the third-grade dream remained.
— Brian Castner, The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows
So when people see me walking on the street, they feel like we're old pals. Women pull my cheeks and men clap me on the shoulder; I'm like a petting zoo. But movie stars, on the other hand, are much more untouchable. Those are people that you watch from afar. They're regal lions. I'm a friendly goat.
— Kunal Nayyar
You're very beautiful, dear', she said, 'what nationality are you, Indian?''No', I smiled, 'I'm Aboriginal.'She looked at me in shock. 'You can't be,' she said.'I am.''Oh, you poor thing,' she said, putting her arm around me, 'what on earth are you going to do?
— Sally Morgan
You're very beautiful, dear", she said, "what nationality are you, Indian?""No", I smiled, "I'm Aboriginal."She looked at me in shock. "You can't be," she said."I am.""Oh, you poor thing," she said, putting her arm around me, "what on earth are you going to do?
— Sally Morgan, My Place
Part of the torture of autism is that the future is so impossibly unsure. Your child might become a fully functioning member of society and appear no different than anyone else, even if he does have to look at mouths instead of eyes and can't stand to give his own kids a bath. Or, he might be so violent that he requires institutionalization... Either way, you're expected to work your ass off for it.
— Jennifer Noonan, No Map to This Country
You know Becky, you haven't been the same since that crowbar fell on your head." - - said to me by my mother after I eloped with a guy I'd known for about 30 days, when I was 18 years old!
— Becky Lewellen Povich
We don't give up, even when things are bad.We pay our debts.We work hard.We act decently.We help our neighbours if they need it.We do what we say we will do.We don't want much attention.We look after our own.We are proud of what we do.We try to be quietly smart.We take chances sometimes to get on.We will fail sometimes.We will be affected by the wider world...But we hold on to who we are.
— James Rebanks
We aren’t afraid of what we can explain.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
In the aftermath of destruction, a silence settles – the stillness of fresh loss. People’s cheerful chatter is fainter, the blue color of sky dimmer; now that horror is undeniable and feels inescapable, the value of life seems lessened.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
If you had met my father you would never, not for an instant, have thought he was an assassin.
— Magda Szubanski, Reckoning: A Memoir
But the truth was stranger than an aimless road, it always was.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
My relationship with my mother trapped me in the identity of a child.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Living as Wild Child, I could no longer be Debby Parker comfortably — this name that I’d been given at birth that defined me before I’d had the chance to define myself.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
She’d taken care of me in all the ways my body needed, but the devastation of my rape had made me feel the weight of the essential way she had neglected me: she hadn’t nurtured the potential of my strong and healthy independence.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Squatting on my bed–after twelve years of trying and missing, in about two minutes total–I put my own contacts in for the first time. Second try on the right eye, first try on the left. I blinked in the contact, my apartment where I now lived alone and my story coming into focus.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I hoped my solitude would help me reclaim my innocence, remember who I’d been, to find who I wanted to be. To become her. To love her, Deborah, Debby, Doll Girl, Wild Child, me, despite the irreversible truth that I’d been raped. I was learning again that I could trust myself and, also, I was seeing, other people. I was brave enough now to go out alone towards what I wanted, to trust that I was strong enough for it, to know that help would come when I needed it. It always came.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I didn’t know what I would do. There was no way I could survive. I stared at my damp tent ceiling, feeling the frigid air against me, the frozen ground against my bottom, so cold my bare skin burned. I needed to get to the next trail-town, Mammoth Lakes. There was no one here to save me now.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
This was a vision of wildness contained – caged. Huge, powerful animals whose wild dignity was stripped from them.Panic jolted me. These animals had had their freedom seized by people who put their own desires first. In the glint of the silver cage bars I saw the same steely repression, the same cold entitlement that allows people to feel it is okay to steal bodies and lives as I glimpsed while frozen beneath Junior. The boy who had put his few minutes of pleasure before my entire life.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
He hadn’t treated me with the love and compassion I wanted, but I was worthy of that love, and someday some boy would have it for me. I hadn’t found it yet, but I would find it soon.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
My path, beyond doubt or denial. I just hadn’t looked toward it. I wasn’t lost. I’d always known the way. If I’d only allowed myself to look. I had never been lost, only scared.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
death is not a pretty flower that had almost pricked me. It was not a small annoyance I could simply bypass and quickly disregard. It was really The End.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I couldn’t yet piece together the disconnected clues to understand the origin of these lights. To explain away strange magic, I’d convinced myself there was an unseen road cutting across the boundless desert floor like a scar. I imagined its different possible courses. The mystery intrigued me. I couldn’t think of the real destination this road would have been built to lead to, but I accepted I couldn’t see, and I accepted it was there, strange but – from where I stood – a beautiful vision.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Actions are prayers too, and as I am trying, not always successfully, to be a good parent, a good husband, a good teacher, I sometimes think: this is my conversation with God. It seems to me now that the action of walking to Santiago was, in itself, a prayer – a prayer repeatedly and resoundingly answered. Benjamin is an answered prayer, of course, but so was James. He just wasn’t the answer we expected.
— David Hlavsa, Walking Distance: Pilgrimage, Parenthood, Grief, and Home Repairs
My mother overstated the dangers of the world – invented threats. And so I saw: Starbursts’ hoof-made gelatin never gave me mad cow. Mad cow was not a threat to me. And so I thought: most risks weren’t truly real.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Pittsburgh did not smell of mayonnaise that day.
— sstaas, You, With The Head Down
That was it. To be a rolling stone. In the romantic places of the earth. Ready for a fight, a frolic, or a feed. And since I was Irish, since I was Billy Hamill's son, since I was from Brooklyn: a drink too.
— Pete Hamill, A Drinking Life: A Memoir
I sensed he was the one who might be able to see me clearly, the way I most wished to be seen.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Who knows what the long-term effects of saving rescue dogs are and the healing lessons and love they bring to Earth? Each one of us has the capacity to influence hundreds - even thousands of people or animals through the way we live our lives.
— Jadi Kindred, Intuitive Animal Connections
The entire time, he’d only ever looked at my body, never at my face, his empty eyes hungry, never seeing me at all. I wasn’t the presence of a person, but a body. I could have said anything, he wouldn’t have heard me. He’d never responded, not by stopping, not with his words.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Chinese proverb says that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This journey had begun with the coercion of my body, with my own wild hope.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Humor writers:1) Write2) Laugh3) Laugh when they write4) Write when they laugh
— Ann K. Howley, Confessions of a Do-Gooder Gone Bad
I’d begun at the soundless place where California touches Mexico with five Gatorade bottles full of water and eleven pounds of gear and lots of candy. My backpack was tiny, no bigger than a schoolgirl’s knapsack. Everything I carried was everything I had.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
If I wanted to go to bed at ten o’clock I did. If I wanted to go to bed at six p.m., I did. I woke at sunrise because the new sun lit my eyes. The sun was my clock; my body my pace-keeper. I started walking when I wanted, kept going until precisely when I wanted to stop.When I was tired, feeling like stopping but wanting to persist, I’d listen to Blood On The Tracks.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I felt like I belonged to an ancient tradition of all young people given this same task of finding their own ways through to the futures they wanted for themselves.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I wrote through darkness, vividly seeing: my passivity was not a crime; my desire to trust was not a flaw.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn’t walked away from school, through devastating beauty alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, met rattlesnakes and bears, fording frigid and remote rivers as deep as I am tall—feeling terror and the gratitude that followed the realization that I’d survived rape—I’d have remained lost, maybe for my whole life. The trail had shown me how to change.This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation.I wrote it.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I began to lust after our conjoining life.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
But I couldn’t say any of this yet. No one answer felt it could contain anything close to the truth about her. My thoughts of my mother were wild chaos, I didn’t know how to tell him we’d been enmeshed for as long as I could remember.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Ask not what your Joe Montaperto can do for you, but rather what YOU can do for your Joe Montaperto.
— Joe Montaperto, The Edge of Whiteness
Happy people have everything to give.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
But that's hindsight for you: never there when you need it.
— Janet Givens, Fan Favorites: Bonus Scenes from a Peace Corps Memoir
Fire is not essential. Fire is warm comfort. From fire, cultures are born.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I wanted him to declare in shock how overlooked and underestimated I had been ever since I was a child. How lucky he felt to be the one to have discovered me, to have me. I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I wanted him to look at me like maybe I was magic.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I wanted both things: strength in my independence and also this new desire. This felt like the beginning of a new kind of love.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I don’t remember having one conversation with my dad in the three days I was home, but looking back at my journal, I see I wrote about him. I scrawled about how I heard him telling my mom that I needed to go back. I was unhappy; he thought the hiking was better for me.I wonder why he told these things to my mother, nothing to me.I wonder if overhearing his approval encouraged me to finally fly back to the trail. Maybe. Maybe my father’s faith in my walk—in me—made me feel strong enough to leave. His actual words, as I wrote them in my notebook, were, “She’s an adult now, she can do what she wants. It doesn’t mean she’s not selfish.” He almost understood.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
It felt amazing to make visible my boundaries.The rumors dissipated, then changed. Eventually I turned down enough men that I became the girl who turned down men.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
He was sprightly and uncommonly good looking, with a quiet, magnanimous confidence that attracted people. He was my hero, too, and I listened to him. He gave me lots of wise advice. He told me to put myself in win-win situations, and that, “You have to know what you want, and you have to get it,
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I was going to mean what I said, to be direct and firm.I found my moleskin notebook and on the page behind the pages addressed to Never-Never and my family—two unsent letters—I wrote: I am the director of my life.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Already, this little-walked gigantic trail through my country’s Western wilderness held in my mind the promise of escape from myself, the liberation only a huge transformation could grant me. This walk would be my salvation. It had to be.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
The PCT would lead me to an otherworld, through the sadness I felt here, out of it.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I was no longer following a trail. I was learning to follow myself.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I needed only to allow myself to know what I already knew.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
It took me almost two thousand miles in the woods to see I had to do some hard work that wasn’t simply walking—that I needed to begin respecting my own body’s boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me. Moving forward, I wanted rules.First—when I felt unsafe I’d leave, immediately. The first time, not the tenth time. Not after a hundred red flags smacked in wind violently, clear as trail signs pointing the way to SNAKES. Not after I’d been bitten—the violation. If I wasn’t interested, I would reject the man blatantly.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
In lovesickness we had found a common language.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I wanted to come close to fierce wild things. They seemed prehistoric, rare and sacred.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
She taught me only how to need to be taken care of. I was here because I needed to learn to take responsibility for making my own decisions — to earn my own trust.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I’m so drunk,” I said through the bathroom door, though it wasn’t true. I’d declared it to him in my anxiety to take pressure and responsibility off of myself for what I wanted to do next. I had already decided I at least wanted to kiss him, be held. Yet my desire surprised me. I felt the weight of shame not only on rape now, but on sex too. I was confused by it. I felt unready to hold myself responsible for the decision if I slept with him.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
The wisdom of my body had cultivated vibrantly since those sadness-drunken months after the rape when I’d felt so numbed by the hurt and shame that I didn’t move further. No longer. The way I felt about being sexually shamed had changed. Now I was angry that others were trying to shame my sexuality in the first place. I flushed—this time not in shame—but in rage.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
These tools were my parents’ way of saying: What you’re doing is important. We support it. We want to help you find your way.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I was desperate not to confront the fact that this really could be it—that "nineteen" didn't matter, that there really was a point at which even young bodies fail. I was not immortal.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Though I was starved for contact, I didn’t stop to talk to any of these strangers. I had forgotten how to convincingly speak the polite things strangers say to each other.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
He understood. In lovesickness we had found a common language.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
It was my first lesson in the fragility of attraction.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I walked without breaks, slept through nights without waking, inhumanly smooth – a small machine.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
All I could think as he was speaking was that, if he touched me at all, all the miles I’d walked, the pain I’d felt, the beauty I’d drunken like milk, like good wine making me happy, the four million steps I’d taken, would all add up to nothing. They’d be stolen.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I reached into my pack and held something small in the fist I made. “It’s a pocketknife,” I said, enunciating each letter. I was asserting myself, I’d snapped out of something; he visibly snapped out of something too. I saw it acutely in his dropping posture: doubt in his movement. I said, “The truck works.” And so it did.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I was able to pitch a tent and carry a backpack twenty-five miles a day through mountains—I’d mastered a thousand amazing physical feats—physically I’d become undeniably confident and capable—but physical weakness had never been the problem that I had. My true problem had been passivity, the lifelong-conditioned submission that became my nature.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I needed to begin respecting my own body’s boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me. Moving forward, I wanted rules.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
My malady was submission.The symptom: my compliance.The antidote was loud clear boundaries.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I felt unready to hold myself responsible for the decision if I slept with him
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
The small word, “No.” I’d see its deity.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Second—I’d take much better care of myself.There were simple things I could do. I could start with my poor feet. These little two feet carried me each day for miles and miles, steady and flexed, tired and aching from constant daily pounding, bruised scratched and sometimes rubbed red-raw, my weight pressing and pressing them. I decided now that each night in my tent I’d massage them. I would knead them with lotion because they always ached, and at the end of thirty-mile days they burned—and it would be luxurious—something I could have done the entire way because I had been carrying sun lotion but had never taken the ten sacred minutes to do for myself.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
When I felt strongly I would say it strongly.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I needed to stop hiding: I was raped. It was time to honestly be exactly who I was. I saw—the shame wasn't mine, it was his, and I could stop misrepresenting myself, and I could accept myself.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
And the idea of light unexplainably produced out of nothing was haunting, it shook me. A flat drab mountain could produce its own light, no one in this whole world knows why, and if that was possible then of course there must be other things that seemed impossible that weren’t, and so anything—great and terrible—felt possible to me now.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Childhood is a wilderness.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I was beginning to feel compassion for myself.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I had stripped naked in front of men. Drunk. In morning’s somber brightness I tried to remember why I had done it. Total exposure had seemed like the only way to be seen more clearly, heard, but now it seemed the opposite: a wild act that would define me.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I am not your dog that you whistle for; I’m not a stray animal you call over, and I am not, I never have been, nor will I ever be, your “baby”!
— Joy Jennings, I'm Not Your "Baby": An Australian woman's tortured life of sexual harassment and assault
When we apply the lessons we've struggled for our whole lives to learn to the lives of people we love, our love becomes judgment—which is toxic. Our fear our daughters will fail leads us to fail them.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I doubted I could survive in the woods without these very basic things to help me. It seemed like a tremendous leap of faith to forsake the tools I’d always been told I needed. And yet leaving college to walk was such a massive leap of faith already, and nothing I’d ever trusted and believed in seemed true any longer.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
We aren’t afraid of what we can explain.But the truth is stranger than an aimless road, it always was. The world was full of blinding mysteries, and I was blind to truth of what they were. There were things about the world I couldn’t understand.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
She told me that women who wore makeup had bad values. Putting on makeup would have been a statement—a rebellion. I didn’t try it. I grew to feel guilty for wanting to feel attractive.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
It was suddenly Technicolor clear: the only thing holding me from giving myself vision this entire time had actually simply been me.I saw how in the fall and winter of my childhood, I'd walked through the golden aspens. And then I simply committed and gave myself my own eyes.I had once again proven that again alone, I was again enough.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Water was liquid silver, water was gold. It was clarity—a sacred thing.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
After twelve years of trying, I just decided to stop missing.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Children believe they are immortal, death is an empty word like the name of a country they’ve never been to on a time-faded map. I wasn’t a child anymore.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I realized that no, no one would actually come to save or even stop me, I had absolutely no choice. The scale tipped: the moment not doing it became more difficult and unbearable than just doing it.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
The night Junior stayed, my right to myself was taken from me in a way that had felt more final than ever before. Then the school had denied my rape—my word. The subsequent silencing and exile—misplaced shame—were the catalysts for me to finally break free of my mother's grasp and my voicelessness and do what I truly wanted, alone. I wished to prove myself as independent and valid and strong—to my mother, and to the world. I'd believed I had needed something huge and external that no one could deny was impressive, so I could show my family I was able—so they could finally know that I was strong.Instead I had shown myself.And it felt wonderful.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Because I feared I couldn't walk to Newton Centre without her, I needed to hike through desert, snow and woods alone.Childhood is a wilderness.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
She had wanted me to hold rape inside me like a dark pearl, keep it in there, as it grew, as I grew cramped, as it overtook me as hidden things do. Secrets become lies. I'd carried in every step I took this lie, the shame of it.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
The only thing to do with tears is water your flowers with them, so that there is something to show the world when the sun comes out.
— Fran Macilvey, Trapped: My Life with Cerebral Palsy
I came from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation.
— Flannery O'Connor
We're distracted and we let the door slam on the person behind us, we trip over curbs as we're texting, we're...sedentary, weighed down, collapsed over the laptop. ...We've forgotten how to move through life with grace.
— Sarah L. Kaufman, The Art of Grace: On Moving Well Through Life
It was heartbreaking to realize how we can fail the people we most love without even trying.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
Popeye the Sailor Man has more cultural longevity. Only women and poofs read or write now. Otherwise, these days, no sooner has someone been sodomised by a close relative than they think they can write a memoir. The game’s up.
— Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word
Absolutely devout in her complete care of my body, she had only taught me to be weak and voiceless. But I had unlearned that lesson. Our enmeshment no longer felt to me like proof of love. I was no longer willing to permit this silencing. Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing—able—to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed her to help me, to take care of things for me—and to save me—but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I felt ridiculously self-conscious, like the stick of celery at a luxurious buffet.
— Fran Macilvey, Trapped: My Life with Cerebral Palsy
Breathe in the small things
— Claire Snyman, Two Steps Forward: Embracing Life With A Brain Tumor
We tried to change Vietnam. Instead, Vietnam changed us.
— Tony Thomson, Eat Your Heart Out, Ho Chi Minh: Or Things You Won't Learn at Yale
Remember how we put stickers with your name on your pocessions that could be stolen.We didn't put a sticker on your innocence so don't lose it!
— Candace Allan, Text Me, Love Mom: Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest
This is the trouble with real-life story arcs: the happiness is so rarely saved for the end.
— Richard Glover
Memory was my drug of choice. -Pea Hicks
— Larry Smith, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure
Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind," Leviticus says. From where I was standing, though, there was no "lying with mankind" going on; it looked more like "one mankind plowing another mankind from behind.
— Tim Anderson, Sweet Tooth: A Memoir
Make time your friend and not your enemy
— Claire Snyman, Two Steps Forward: Embracing life with a brain tumor
I'd have to be impolite, an inconvenience, and sometimes awkward. But if I could commit, all that discomfort would add up to zap predatory threads like a Taser gun. I'd stun them. They'd bow to me. I'd let my no echo against the mountains.And better to feel bad for a moment saying no—and stop it—than to get harmed.I would take better care.That small word, no. I'd see its deity.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
I made a conscious effort to name my needs and desires. To carefully listen to and accurately identify what I felt. Hunger, exhaustion, cold, lower-back ache, thirst. The ephemeral pangs: wistfulness and loneliness. Rest fixed most things. Sleep was my sweet reward. I treated bedtime as both incentive and sacrament.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
View other authors as your allies rather than your competition
— Shannon Love, Twisting My Kaleidoscope
Maybe I'd die. Maybe I'd burn to ash in wind, or blacken like the pines. Charred skeletons, I'd add one to the count. I didn't feel scared. I didn't think to panic. The trail wasn't burning. I was raw, ripe for loving. I wasn't stopping.
— Aspen Matis, Girl in the Woods: A Memoir
You are not yourself in autobiography. It is never going to be you, it is only words on a page. Memories are unreliable, so adding the magic of imagination will make your story come alive.
— K.H. Rennie
Instead of an unhinged lunatic you may glimpse a punctured soul-a mere human being like you.
— Shannon Love, Twisting My Kaleidoscope
That is one of the great gifts of The Evolution of Us. Vulnerability. Christine finds it in the women she interviews, and then offers it openly from herself, too. We learn through her writing to live moment to moment, to embrace our insecurities, and to lean on one another… Lauree Ostrofsky, CPCSimply Leap, LLC
— Christine Woodcock, The Evolution of Us: Portraits of Mothers and Their Changing Roles
Destiny is not always preordained. Life is about making choices. Our lives are the sum of all the choices we make, the bridges we cross, and the ones we burn. Our souls cast long shadows over many people, even after we are gone. Fate, luck, and providence are the consequence of our freedom of choice, not the determinants. When justice is served by following our principles, making good decisions brings us inner peace.
— Judith Land, Adoption Detective: Memoir of an Adopted Child
You had nightmares every night for a long time and screamed in Korean words, but we didn't know what they meant. I asked someone who knew Korean, and he said it was um-ma um-ma, the word for mom.
— Soojung Jo, Ghost of Sangju
Not everyone is capable of sacrificing his own life. So it is, always has been and always will be.
— Tadeusz Pankiewicz
I have learned that I am a better everything because I wanted and loved those babies so much. I am also a better everything because I lost them. Sure, the losses left my heart and soul shattered at first, but now with daily work in recovery I have a scarred but healing heart and soul
— Justine Brooks Froelker, Ever Upward: Overcoming the Lifelong Losses of Infertility to Define Your Own Happy Ending
It is not a crime to commit First Degree Writing
— Temple Emmet Williams, Warrior Patient: How to Beat Deadly Diseases With Laughter, Good Doctors, Love, and Guts
These two Joes—the nasty bully and the starry-eyed dreamer—were my father. Growing up, the difficulty was knowing just which Joe would rise with the sun that day.
— Pythia Peay, American Icarus: A Memoir of Father and Country
They departed in the form of white smoke, rose easily upward, waved their hands in parting, and viewed with pity all those who remained behind. Then they danced gaily in celebration of their new freedom, before disintegrating into the air.
— Joseph Bau, Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry?
I'm ready for the day when Mom loves me too much to keep me, and for every other person who will someday see that I'm not worth holding on to.
— Soojung Jo, Ghost of Sangju
I don't understand this--when people love you so much they are willing to get rid of you. I think if I loved someone that much I'd want to stay with them. It doesn't make sense that love would make a mother leave, and I wonder when this mother will love me that much too. I get the idea that love might be something to both desire and fear, and maybe if we don't love each other too much I won't have to go away again. I wonder why love works for everyone else, but it doesn't work for me.
— Soojung Jo, Ghost of Sangju
Having a blood family means suddenly revising a definition of family that I have, over many years, learned to accept. How can I hold both concepts in my mind or find room for both families in my heart?
— Soojung Jo, Ghost of Sangju
Running away is vastly underrated.
— Cara Lopez Lee, They Only Eat Their Husbands: Love, Travel, and the Power of Running Away
Pen and paper have been my life, now they may herald my death. But I asked for these, the traditional tools of my trade, and to my surprise my request has been granted.
— Susan Leona Fisher, The Year I Found Great Aunt Alice
I’d very much like to ‘conclude' something from this experiment. Or that it should raise a question in my mind, and a commitment to get to the bottom of the matter, to investigate, to come up with an outline of the beginning of an answer, however ill-defined or trite it might be . . . But no. I’m here to see, hear, observe - to experience. Let others explain.
— Jacques Yonnet, Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City
What made them particularly unusual was the way Steve presented them. He was rational and fluent and had given much thought to the problems he was discussing, although he had not thought about the implications of the thing – that this was socially deviant conduct of the highest order, involving injuries and maiming and the destruction of property., I don’t think he understood the implications; I don’t think he would have acknowledged them as valid.
— Bill Buford
The Americans were understandably on hair triggers. There was a good reason for all of this security. For despite TV images of quick victory, much of Baghdad certainly had not fallen and firefights with die-hard Ba’athists loyal to Saddam Hussein were raging all over the city.
— Lawrence Anthony, Babylon's Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo
The nearest one came to a tumble dryer was if the laundry basket was dropped on the way to the washing-line and then the whole lot went tumbling down the drive.
— Ann Patras, Into Africa: 3 Kids, 13 Crates and a Husband
Romance blossomed over a carrier bag full of mackerel. It wasn't exactly how I imagined it would happen; there were no sunsets, or butterflies, or birdsong, just some smelly dead fish and a slimy carrier bag.
— Victoria Twead, One Young Fool in Dorset
...I didn't want to be a passenger on someone else's motorcycle.I wanted to be the one riding that motherfucker.
— Lily Brooks-Dalton
My shipmates and I only grasped our roles on the very superficial level we were taught. We were fighting the bad guys. They were the bad guys because we were told that they were the bad guys. We had to control, infiltrate, and shove our authority around the world because we were its greatest nation. We had the shiniest ships, the biggest guns, the deadliest weapons, and the cockiest egos. And if we thought otherwise, we were vicious traitors. The military condemns rebels, thinkers, and doubt. The military loves obedience, loyalty, and oblivion. Its core values are, after all, “Honor, Courage, and Commitment.
— Maggie Georgiana Young, Just Another Number
Indie authors write, design, sell. Like magic, skip one and you make must read vanish.
— Temple Emmet Williams
I do not NEED a man. That was an impossible thought when I married John thirty years ago. It was unimaginable even seven years ago. I finally understand why lasting love has eluded me: the relationship I've been searching for all along was with myself.
— Shary Hauer, Insatiable: A Memoir of Love Addiction
But instability like mine needs considerable distance to pass for mere quirkiness.
— Terri Cheney
Shut your mouth - there's a bus coming.
— Linda De Quincey, Tommy's Tunnel: My grandad's story and his role in the Battle of Messines Ridge
In a world where the most consequential things happen by chance, or from unfathomable causes, you don't look to reason for help. You consort with mysteries... They have been killed in place of you - in your place. You don't think it out, not at the time, not in those terms, but you can't help but feel it, and go on feeling it. It's the close call you have to keep escaping from, the unending doubt that you have a right to your own life. It's the corruption suffered by everyone who lives on, that henceforth they must wonder at the reason and probe its justice.
— Tobias Wolff
Your heartbeat is so different from his," I whisper it; he has to ask me to repeat myself. I explain, "My father…his heartbeat was so fast. I could feel it, racing…it was like his heartbeat shook my whole body. Your heart…it's steady. It feels safe. It's calming me down." And so we stand, and I cry, and listen to his heart until I am calm again, and then we get back to cleaning.
— Sana Lynn, Metanoia: Reweaving Psyche in a Tantric Web of Story
I define success as being the best, authentic me that I can be.
— Leeky Behrman, The Choices We Make: A Memoir about Surviving and a Journey to Love & Happiness
It was clear that most of my insecurities originated from my need to have things be “perfect.” I wasn’t sure what bothered me more
—  the fact that I had no control over the changes of my body and hair or that this horrible situation was only happening to me.
How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books.
— Thomas Merton The Seven Storey Mountain
I’m pretty sure Number 1 wasn’t even aware that he was using a man’s deadliest weapon against women. He exposed his vulnerability. Over the years, I would repeat a pattern of chronically caving to that same behavior. It didn’t matter whether or not I liked or respected him. Every time he dared to let his guard down and unveil some of his ugliest, grittiest faces, I whole-heartedly believed I was the only person on earth being let in on a secret. It was a mirage of a connection. Despite his faults and my prior resistance, I felt an obligation to uphold that bond. No matter what kind of person he was or how toxic he could have been, I saw beauty in that fleeting defenselessness as if he were an infant, innocent and untainted by the evils of the world. I always fell in love with that face in every man. I clutched that memory tightly, despite the fact that its weight wore my arms and drug my pace. I was so focused on remembering their moment of weakness that I was blind to who they normally were.
— Maggie Georgiana Young, Just Another Number
Love is bigger than everything.
— Reba Riley, Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome: A Memoir of Humor and Healing in 30 Religions
Sometimes to move forward, you have to find yourself backwards.
— Reba Riley, Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome: A Memoir of Humor and Healing in 30 Religions
From my first stab at second base, I became obsessively concerned for my vaginal upkeep. I began shaving the day after I felt my first tongue down my throat. The first buzz was a disaster, causing horrifically itchy dull razor breakout that made me look like I made love to a poison ivy bush. Whenever I thought there was a chance of unveiling my privates, I smothered every breakout with the same foundation I used for the occasional teenage acne face breakouts.
— Maggie Georgiana Young
I considered not getting up, but recognized the pain of staying down was worse than the pain of attempting to stand.
— Reba Riley, Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome: A Memoir of Humor and Healing in 30 Religions
Dance, dance for meDance with the starsLaugh, laugh for meWherever you areSing, sing out loudLike angels doRemember meThe way I'll remember youLove, love for meWith all your soulCry, cry for meAs I grow oldSee, see me from the edge of Heaven's eyeFeel for me 'cause feelings never dieI'll remember youMy very special friendUntil we meet again(By Carrie Hamilton, Carol Burnett's daughter)
— Carol Burnett
If you are a twin, you watch yourself live two lives–yours and hers. It’s constant comparison. I am never as good as the bad I wanted her to be. I was the only soldier I needed. We couldn’t haven known what splitting would mean. Time speeds past fast, scattering like shrapnel, and is quiet as cobwebs. We wait for the ambush. Sister will find out first; she’ll be my living memory. She will be the body left standing.
— Christa Parravani
In order to write a memoir, I’ve sat still inside the swirling vortex of my own complicated history like a piece of old driftwood, battered by the sea. I’ve waited—sometimes patiently, sometimes in despair—for the story under pressure of concealment to reveal itself to me. I’ve been doing this work long enough to know that our feelings—that vast range of fear, joy, grief, sorrow, rage, you name it—are incoherent in the immediacy of the moment. It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters
— Dani Shapiro
For the longest time I was so sick I didn't have the strength or inclination to read, but looking at my books stacked up on the bedside table was comforting, like having old friends sitting in the room with me, friends who didn't require anything of me, friends who brought me great pleasure just with their presence, waiting until I could engage with them again.... bibliophiles know the inanimate pleasure of the friendship with books.
— Lindsey O'Connor