#memo

You're maybe eighteen. Your mother didn't love you enough so you decided to pierce your lip and brand your body to piss her off. You hang around this band because they make you feel like you belong. And most days you wish you were in a band of your own, but you know that probably will never happen." I met his eyes waiting. I'm twenty. my mother has an assload of tattoos herself, she thinks its art. I have a lip ring because it turns girls on when I do this." He licked his lip, lingering on the metal for a couple intense seconds. My eyes fluttered with nervousness. ↗

— Holly Hood

#love #love-story #memorable #music #wit

Work hard. "Suit yourself, then you'll know at least one person is pleased. ↗

— Carole Estrup

#child-abuse #healing-the-past #memoir #art

If you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember. ↗

— Joshua Foer

#art

Dad used to read aloud to us from Dickens and Kipling. My tastes were omnivorous. I read anything I could lay my hands on, but the memory that stays with me is that of my father reading the Jungle Books to us when we were young. Beautiful stories! ↗

— A.B. Guthrie

#childhood-memory #childhood-stories #dickens #interview-transcription #kipling

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist. ↗

— Tracy Kidder

#writing #writing-process #art

When we first hear [a] word, we start putting these associational hooks into it that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date. ↗

— Joshua Foer

#memory #art

The entire partying lifestyle was superficial in my experience, and most of my friendships were as deep as a shot glass and as short-lived as a pack of cigarettes. ↗

— Kate Madison

#friendship #lifestyle #memoir #partying #shot-glass

I Came away from the U.S. Memory Championship eager to find out how Ed and Lukas did it. Were these just extraordinary individuals, pridigies from the long tail of humanity's bell curve, or was there something we could all learn from their talents? ↗

— Joshua Foer

#humanity #memory #talent #art

The true art of memory, is the art of attention ↗

— Samuel Johnson

#memory #art

If you want help in starting to write memoirs, you don't want to fall into the clutches of a famous writer who has been hired to teach at a writing workshop solely because of his name's ability to attract students, rather than because of any teaching skill. You should not have to grapple with someone who secretly thinks you should be writing about his life rather than your own. ↗

— Judith Barrington

#writing #art