Sister, why do you do that?””Do what?””Cage the animals at night?””Well…” She looked up and out through the barred window before answering me.”We don’t want to, Jennings, but we have to. You see, the animals...

Granny Trill and Granny Wallon were traditional ancients of a kind we won’t see today, the last of that dignity of grandmothers to whom age was its own embellishment. The grandmothers of those days dressed...

innere”, den damals wurden Chroniken hoch geachtet, als enthielten sie die Wahrheit. Der innere Ausdruck war noch nicht geboren.

It turns out, after a lot of exploration, that I’m not really a princess. A swell gal, sure, but not a princess.

For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we’ve all had to become disappears, when we’re confronted with something as simple as a plate of food.

Ipinangako ko sa sarili ko: tulad ng butil ng palay, hindi ako mapupunta sa batuhan o hihipan lang ng hangin. Mapupunla ako sa mayamang bukirin.

Wenn man keine Sprache hat, ist alles Durcheinander, und man hat Angst vor Dingen, von denen man sich nicht zu fürchten braucht. In dieser Zeit stotterten die meisten der Kinder um mich herum, sprachen laut...

When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been,...

You know, Becky, you haven’t been the same since that crowbar fell on your head.

For whatever time I have to live, I intend to enjoy myself.” – Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live.

In diesen Jahren hatte ich in Israel keine Menschenseele. Doch solche verborgenen Gerechten erschienen gerade in den Momenten, in denen die Verzweiflung mich unterzukriegen drohte.Ich bin dem einmal nachgegangen. Jeder, der den Krieg überlebte, überlebte...

One of the ways to discover our toughness and resiliency is to look back at where we come from. (from Amazon description)

You can’t just come out and say what you have to say. That’s what people do on airplanes, when a man plops down next to you in the aisle seat of your flight to New...

We learn to appreciate what we achieve, no matter how small the achievement, because we do it ourselves. – Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live

I love memoirs and autobiographies in general.

Hester Lipp had written Where the Sidewalk Starts, an inexplicably acclaimed book of memoir, recounting — in severe language and strange, striking imagery — Lipp’s childhood and adolescence on a leafy suburban street in Burlington....

If you aren’t the woman I think you are, then this isn’t the world I thought it was.

I quickly became aware that the phrase “it can only get better” could very quickly turn into “it could always be worse,” because it was.

I am often described to my irritation as a ‘contrarian’ and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up...

Comme tout le monde, je n’ai à mon service que trois moyens d’évaluer l’existence humaine: l’étude de soi, la plus difficile et la plus dangereuse, mais aussi la plus féconde des méthodes; l’observation des hommes,...

Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that isn’t it

I was born in the house my father built.

They [his readers, whom he asks to be his friends] will find that I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of first introducing it into...

I had spent many nights in the jungle looking for game, but this was the first time I had ever spent a night looking for a man-eater. The length of road immediately in front of...

Oh I’m sure you’re right,” Auntie said. “Probably she’s just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears.

Honesty is vulnerability. Sadly, not everyone can handle someone’s honesty. However, lying allows people to be comfortable.

Desolina and Tony had attended one-room schoolhouses until the third grade. … According to Tony, there were hardly enough pencils and sober teachers to go around. [Author’s grandparents educational background.]

…what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.

I knew even then that she was right. An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day...

Behind every humorist who delights in knifing hypocrites is a major self-critic.

…no matter how frequently we came, when we arrived, they acted as if we had been away one hundred years. [His grandparents’ greeting.]

How paltry are the traces left behind by a life, even one concentrated around those supposed things of permanence called words. We spend our time upon the earth and then disappear, and only one one-thousandth...

Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in...

The artistic bend is a sell-out. It’s all truth, or it’s no good. EIther write what’s in the heart, all of it, the good, the bad, the ugly, the uglier, the privat and even more...

None of my friends had grandparents like these. … Tony and Desolina were exotic.

All good things spring from Self-Love

“Someday,” Magnus said, looking at the crumpled royal person at his feet, “I must write my memoirs.”

We have a racially based justice system that overpunishes, fails to rehabilitate, and doesn’t make us safer.

…just when you think there isn’t any left inside to give, an indestructable inner strength is borne…

Me dad planted that tree,’ she said absently, pointing out through the old cracked window.The great beech filled at least half the sky and shook shadows all over the house.Its roots clutched the slope like...

I am not afraid of tomorrow, for I have seen yesterday and I love today.

Conformity is deformity