#memo

It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while. ↗

— Arthur Golden

#memoirs #life

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours--long hallways and unforeseen stairwells--eventually puts you in the place you are now. ↗

— Ann Patchett

#memory #woman #life

I think the only answer is to live life to the fullest while you can and collect memories like fools collect money. Because in the end, that's all you have - happy memories. ↗

— Sarah Strohmeyer

#memories #life

At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory. ↗

— Isabel Allende

#memory #perception #space #time #words

By having good memories on every place you just visit, you are building paradise in your own heart and your life. ↗

— Toba Beta

#heart #life #memory #paradise #life

What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly. ↗

— Richard Ford

#marriage #memories #memory #nostalgia #life

I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#child #childhood #encouragement #memoir #memories

Only after Mom went missing did you realize that her stories were piled inside you, in endless stacks. Mom's everyday life used to go on in a repeating loop, without a break. Her everyday words, which you didn't think deeply about and sometimes dismissed as useless when she was with you, awoke in your heart, creating tidal waves. ↗

— Kyung-Sook Shin

#mother-s-love #sacrifice #life

Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds. Now and then the light will fall on a particular point in time, illuminating it for a moment before the wind seals up the gap, and the world is in shadows again. ↗

— Tan Twan Eng

#loneliness #memory #perception #perspective #time

That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. ↗

— Ted Hughes

#inspirational-quotes #life #suffering #inspirational