Lucky Memoir Quotes & Sayings

Months after my first real breakup, I was experiencing the ego thrash that comes with watching an old boyfriend move on. I was lucky she wasn't a beauty queen. Dissecting her physical flaws was the aspirin that would not heal my wounds, but temporarily eased my pain. For the first time in my life, I managed to behave like a true southern belle. I lifted my lips into a bright smile and warmly greeted my enemy as if she were my new best friend.
With all the phony verbal sugar I could muster I said, "Hi! We haven't met before. My name's Maggie. — Maggie Young

He meant to live. — George R R Martin

Saw him where?"
"While I was sitting outside with one of my half aunts."
This seemed to satisfy Ronan was well, because he asked, "What's the other half of her?"
"God, Ronan," Adam said. "Enough. — Maggie Stiefvater

Too much is almost enough — Frederick Seidel

People prefer to get what they want rather than what they deserve. — Julian Barnes

She had all the best things wrong with her - incest, insanity, drug addiction, bulimia, alopecia: you name it. All the perfect stuff for a memoir. She's so lucky. — Peter Cameron

Be realistic we're told. Listen to feedback. Play well with others. Compromise. Well, what if the "other" party is wrong? What if conventional wisdom is too conservative? It's this all-too-common impulse to complain, defer, and then give up that holds us back. — Ryan Holiday

This should have been a red flag, I realize in retrospect. Working really hard on anything is, by definition, not cool. — Leila Sales

Make an enemy of certainty and befriend doubt. When you can change your mind, you can change anything. — Kevin Ashton

Wise or unwise, who doubts for a moment that contentment is the cause of happiness? Yet the inverse is true: we are contented because we are happy, and not happy because we are contented. Well-regulated minds may be satisfied with a small portion of happiness; none can be happy with a small portion of content. — Walter Savage Landor

It's always interesting to me to tell stories that come from difficult political climates. — Jim Sturgess

If you love someone enough, you can make them invincible. Like your feelings for them are so strong they work as a magical shield, protecting them from all harm and pain. — Linda Kage

I have referred to it as a gift--something for which others with this affliction have taken me to task. I was only speaking from my own experience, of course, but I stand partially corrected: if it is a gift, it's the gift that just keeps on taking.

Coping with relentless assault and the accumulating damage is not easy. Nobody would ever choose to have this visited upon them. Still, this unexpected crisis forced a fundamental life decision: adopt a siege mentality--or embark upon a journey. Whatever it was--courage? acceptance? wisdom?--that finally allowed me to go down the second road (after spending a few disastrous years on the first) was unquestionably a gift--and absent this neurophysiological catastrophe, I would never have opened it, or been so profoundly enriched. That's why I consider myself a lucky man. — Michael J. Fox

The dogma of the impossibility of determining the atomic constitution of substances, which until recently was advocated with such fervor by the most able chemists, is beginning to be abandoned and forgotten; and one can predict that the day is not far in the future when a sufficient collection of facts will permit determination of the internal architecture of molecules. A series of experiments directed toward such a goal is the object of this paper. — Wilhelm Korner

Old men want to feel that the experience which has come with their years is valuable, that their advice is valuable, that they possess a sagacity that could be obtained only through experience - a sagacity that could be of use to young men if only young men would ask. — Robert A. Caro

The genius craves inspiration: she craves altered states and fresh perceptions. She will have them either through evolving closer to the divine or through devolving lower into the world. This is how some people with great genius come to die of drug and alcohol addiction: they seek inspiration by intoxication and are thereby ruined. — Carolyn Elliott