All Quotes By Tag: Memoir

“Hi. My name is Sue. Have some Gu, Let me put this under you.IF you ask anyone who has ever taken a wilderness medicine course from me, this is how they remember me. This is what we say to someone we find injured or lost in the backcountry. Introduce yourself, add sugars and insulation to the patient.”

“What to wear on a Minnesota farm? The older farmers I know wear brown polyester jumpsuits, like factory workers. The younger ones wear jeans, but the forecast was for ninety-five degrees with heavy humidity. The wardrobe of Quaker ladies in their middle years runs to denim skirts and hiking boots. This outfit had worked fine for me in England. But one of my jobs in Minnesota will be to climb onto the industrial cuisinart in the hay barn and mix fifty-pound bags of nutritional supplement and corn into blades as big as my body. Getting a skirt caught in that thing would be bad news for Betty Crocker.”

“I would not say I am looking for God. Or, I am not looking for God precisely. I am not seeking the God I learned about as a Catholic child, as an 18-year-old novice in a religious community, as an agnostic graduate student, as – but who cares about my disguises? Or God’s.”

“Understanding the Way of Story as a sacred pattern and a living event. Story can reveal a spiritual path and or the way to healing. Stories become the foundation of health, peacebuilding and vision. Learning to listen, to recognize, to understand and attend the teachings and revelations of the Stories we have been given to live guides us toward the 5th world. Our individual stories, when carefully attended, can reveal each person’s particular path of healing and transformation. Even illness is a story that can lead us to our own and to community healing. Learning to recognize the Story that we or another is living can be a worthy life work.”

“May I see the beauty in others without denigrating my own.”

“The point, I decided, wasn’t to have the autobiography or even the memories. The point was who I became when I wrote.”

“There is a place for what my heart tells me about you, and there is no shame or guilt in it. God Himself is free to look in my heart right this instant and I know He would not shame or admonish me about what He would see there because the pure, ego-less truth of how I hold you in my heart deserves to be kept alive.”

“I’d rather be single, happy, and lonely sometimes than married, lonely, and happy sometimes.”

“Learn from your past and be better because of your past, but don’t cry about your past. Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it. Don’t be bitter.”

“I understood then, with absolute certainty, that theability of the horse to sense emotion, energy and spirit isbeyond what most of the human world realises. This is whytheir impact on us can be so instant, so consistentlypositive, so transformational.”

“Oh dear heart,save yourself. will you not sing yourself to sleephumming wishes you thoughtyou wouldn’t make.will you not step into territoryyou know you should avoid.will you not believe words over actionsbecause you want to trust in pretty little lies.”

“Can you fail and still be strong, Can you not fit in and accept yourself, Can you lose everything and still keep searching, Can you be in the dark and still believe in the light.”

“Time, we like to say, cures all. But maybe the old saying doesn’t mean time heals. Time cures a secret in its brine, keeping it and finally, paradoxically, destroying it. Nothing is left in that salt solution but the pain or rage, the biting shame that lodged it there. Even they are diluted or denied.”

“Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called “Rushdie,” and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.”

“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.”