Quotes & Sayings About Memos

We're angry about this, upset about that, but who has the time to do anything anymore? There are those reports to report on, memos to remember, e-mails to deflect or delete. They bury us like snow. — Mark Slouka

Over fifteen years of studying the American Right professionally - especially in their communications with each other, in their own memos and media since the 1950s - I have yet to find a truly novel development, a real innovation, in far-right 'thought.' — Rick Perlstein

Language can still be an adventure if we remember that words can make a kind of melody. In novels, news stories, memoirs and even to-the-point memos, music is as important as meaning. In fact, music can drive home the meaning of words. — Constance Hale

This supposed to be yall year? We aint get the memo. — Drake

God wants to live this life together with you, to share in your days and decisions, your desires and disappointments. He wants intimacy with you in the midst of the madness and the mundane, the meetings and the memos, the laundry and the lists, the carpools and conversations and projects and pain. He wants to pour his love into your heart and he longs to have you pour yours into his. — John Eldredge

The war drops its question mark. Memos are distributed. The collections must be protected. A small cadre of couriers has begun moving things to country estates. Locks and keys are in greater demand than ever. — Anthony Doerr

Your memo is trumping a Congressional statute. You don't have the discretion on whether to follow the law or not. — Trey Gowdy

Did you know that Jeff Bezos, in place of PowerPoint presentations in meetings, requires his execs to write six-page narrative memos? — Bryan Eisenberg

I had written hundreds of memos during my 26 years at the company, and all had shared a common thread. They were about self-examination in the pursuit of excellence, and a willingness not to embrace the status quo. This is a cornerstone of my leadership philosophy. — Howard Schultz

Writing is for stories to be read, books to be published, poems to be recited, plays to be acted, songs to be sung, newspapers to be shared, letters to be mailed, jokes to be told, notes to be passed, recipes to be cooked, messages to be exchanged, memos to be circulated, announcements to be posted, bills to be collected, posters to be displayed and diaries to be concealed. Writing is for ideas, action, reflection, and experience. It is not for having your ignorance exposed, your sensitivity destroyed, or your ability assessed. — Frank Smith

Industrial bureaucrats - men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. — Kurt Vonnegut

CIA Director George Tenet has now testified before the 9/11 commission and he said we are still making the same dumb mistakes, like leaving memos on the President's desk. — David Letterman

My liberal friends love to dismiss Reagan. You know, they'll say something like, 'Oh, didn't he, like, only read one-page memos when he was in the White House?' Well, that's just good managerial practice. I mean, Franklin Roosevelt made people write one-page memos. — Rick Perlstein

They must believe they were heading somewhere. Or did they not care? Was it a case of following the tracks laid down yesterday? A boot in a hole, a boot in a hole, round and round. Did these men see themselves as deck hands on some great ark with a noble purpose? Or were they walking in circles simply because they knew the way? Donald remembered running for Congress, thinking he was going to do real good for the future. And then he found himself in an office surrounded by a bewildering tempest of rules, memos and messages, and he quickly learned just to pray for the end of each day. He went from thinking he was going to save the world to passing the time until ... until time ran out. — Hugh Howey

I mean, we've had all these awful pictures from the prison in Iraq and these sort of memos floating around about justifying torture, all this kind of stuff. And it makes you want to take a shower, you know? — Ron Reagan

Improbable as it may be, the day still has a few indignities left. The day waters down indignity with frustration to make it last longer. Abomination, thy name is Subway. He cannot enter. They flood through turnstiles, hips banging rods, and will not let him enter. He must get home, but it's all he can do to get halfway in before another one charges at him. A fish out of school. Everybody knows how it works except for him. All of them from every floor are crammed into this one subway car: the makers of memos, the routers of memos, the indexers filers and shredders of memos, the always-at-their-desks and the never-around. How do they all fit. Squabbling like pigeons over stale crumbs of seats. Everyone thinks they are more deserving, everyone thinks their day has been harder than everyone else's, and everyone is correct. — Colson Whitehead

Yeah, I record on voice memos. I got like 1,000-something memos. If I'm in the middle of something and I can't get it done, I'll jot it down, but I never write a rap out, ever. — Big Sean

We don't have a caucus, because we differ on so many views. Some of us are pro-choice, some are not. We'll take the issue of drilling, for example: Lisa Murkowski would want to drill in ANWAR, Maria Cantwell, Barbara Boxer, and most of us would say no, and so we don't. But we get together once a month for dinner, and we have three rules: no memos, no staff, and no leaks; and we get together for friendship. In fact, we're having a dinner tonight. We just have drinks and talk about life and times. — Barbara Mikulski

What these memos do is they make legal acts that were criminal prior to these memos. — Jane Mayer

There's a fantastic, thousand-page book by David Thomson about [David O. Selznick]. Again, it's not the best argument or the best advertisement for his story, because most people aren't going to read a thousand-page book. But I feel like the rise and fall and the work [Mayer] produced - not just the movies, but the memos, the volume of writing - he's just so passionate, and that's really exciting. — Karina Longworth

We writers aren't sculpting in DNA, or even clay or mud, but words, sentences, paragraphs, syntax, voice; materials issued by tongue or fingertips but which upon release dissolve into the atmosphere, into cloud, confection, specter. Language, as a vehicle, is a lemon, a hot rod painted with thrilling flames but crazily erratic to drive, riddled with bugs like innate self-consciousness, embedded metaphors and symbols, helpless intertextuality, and so forth. Despite being regularly driven on prosaic errands (interoffice memos, supermarket receipts, etc.), it tends to veer on its misaligned chassis into the ditch of abstraction, of dream. — Jonathan Lethem

I learned early on that if you don't want your memos to get you in trouble someday, just don't write any. — Dick Cheney

Would it be possible to speak to this Universe person?"
"I'm sure that they will understand that there is a personality conflict." It was time to bump my complaint to upper management.
"No one speaks to the Universe."
"Then how do you know what to do?" I leaned in a little.
"Simple. Through my orders." His eyes started to twitch.
"Which you get how?"
"My memos. — Donna Augustine

Once in a while, Jimmy would make up a word but he never once got caught out ... He should have been pleased by his success with these verbal fabrications, but instead he was depressed by it. The memos telling him he'd done a good job meant nothing to him; all they proved was that no one was capable of appreciating how clever he had been. He came to understand why serial killers sent helpful clues to the police. — Margaret Atwood

The key to leadership is having a vision, and being strong enough to say no and not try to please everybody. Thats a recipe for failure. Leadership is practiced through attitude and actions, rather than words and memos. — Matt Mickiewicz

The angel we named God banned representations of himself, even the writing of his name, trying to halt the process of literalization - but in the end it became inevitable. The angel found himself at the head of a corporation, run by Young Turks who wouldn't respect the line management structure: They rewrote his memos to make the law more rigorous, more confined, more human. He got ousted in a boardroom coup and kicked upstairs. He hadn't realized the power of corporeality, that the minds of men would of necessity alter the mind of their God. Being a deity meant taking on a lot of your subjects' qualities - both profound and trivial. — Michael Marshall Smith

Sometimes I have a notion that what might improve the situation is to have women take over the occupations of government and trade and to give men their freedom. Let them do what they are best at. While we scrawl interoffice memos and direct national or extranational affairs, men could spend all their time inventing wheels, peering at stars, composing poems, carving statues, exploring continents
discovering, reforming, or crying out in a sacramental wilderness. Efficiency would probably increase, and no one would have to worry so much about the Gaza Strip or an election. — Phyllis McGinley

Did you look at the memo?"
"What memo? We're getting memos now?"
"I sent a memo a week ago. I've been sending you a memo every week with a list of all the updates and my notes on all our cases for weeks now."
Holy cow. Missed the boat on that one. "Oh, those memos. I totally knew that."
"You're not even reading them, are you?"
"I thought they were optional."
Note to self: Stop making paper airplanes out of Cookie's memos. — Darynda Jones

The worst period I ever went through at work," a friend confides, "was when the company was restructuring and people were being 'disappeared' daily, followed by lying memos that they were leaving 'for personal reasons.' No one could focus while that fear was in the air. No real work got done." Small wonder. The greater the anxiety we feel, the more impaired is the brain's cognitive efficiency. In this zone of mental misery, distracting thoughts hijack our attention and squeeze our cognitive resources. Because high anxiety shrinks the space available to our attention, it undermines our very capacity to take in new information, let alone generate fresh ideas. Near-panic is the enemy of learning and creativity. — Daniel Goleman

Your hands are not made to type out memos. Or put paper through fax machines. Or hold a phone up while you talk to people you dislike. One hundred years from now, your hands will rot like dust in your grave. You have to make wonderful use of those hands now. Kiss your hands so they can make magic. — James Altucher

Computers are wasteful of paper and time. Once, we'd get documents with a few errors. Now, people make hundreds of copies until each sheet is flawless and memos are duplicated endlessly. Managers get swamped with emails. — Felix Dennis

And Oliver North was really a good soldier, up to the last moment, shoving memos into the shredder and defending the policy to the end. — Bobby Ray Inman

Here we are, practitioners of memos: We send e-mail and we receive it, We copy it and forward it and save it and delete it. We write to move the data, and organize the program, and keep people informed - and know and control and manage. We write and receive one-dimensional memos, that are, at best, clear and unambiguous. And then - in breathtaking ways - you summon us to song. — Walter Brueggemann

One with a cubicle and a desk that snags your panty hose and endless memos about the right way to dispose of recyclables. And lots and lots of petty intrigue and small-minded politics, all intended to distract you from the fact that you're getting two percent raises from a company that's returning twenty percent to its stockholders. That's a real grown-up's job. — Laura Lippman

Thorne sent his answers to Franklin in the form of heavily researched memos. Pages long, deeply sourced, and covered in equations, they were more like scientific journal articles than anything else. Franklin's team wrote new rendering software based on these equations and spun up a wormhole. The result was extraordinary. It was like a crystal ball reflecting the universe, a spherical hole in spacetime. — Anonymous

The only sharks I'm afraid of are the ones that wear three-piece suits and write memos. — Laurie Nadel

What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head. First there's the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly, "Well, that's not very interesting, is it?" And there's the emaciated German male who writes these Orwellian memos detailing your thought crimes. And there are your parents, agonizing over your lack of loyalty and discretion; and there's William Burroughs, dozing off or shooting up because he finds you as bold and articulate as a houseplant; and so on. And there are also the dogs: let's not forget the dogs, the dogs in their pen who will surely hurtle and snarl their way out if you ever stop writing, because writing is, for some of us, the latch that keeps the door of the pen closed, keeps those crazy ravenous dogs contained. — Anne Lamott

One of the most common ways to overcome resistance to change is to educate people about it beforehand. Communication of ideas helps people see the need for and the logic of a change. The education process can involve one-on-one discussions, presentations to groups, or memos and reports. — John P. Kotter

There seems to be more abiding interest in unearthing old memos abroad than there is here. — Gwen Ifill