#memoirs

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 a giant hand, holding the hill in place. Its trunk writhed with power, threw off veils of green dust, rose towering into the air, branched into a thousand shaded alleys, became a city for owls and squirrels. I had thought such trees to be as old as the earth, I never dreamed that a man could make them. Yet it was Granny Trill’s dad who had planted this tree, had thrust in the seed with his finger. How old must he have been to leave such a mark? Think of Granny’s age, and add his on top, and you were back at the beginning of the world. ↗

— Laurie Lee

#memoirs #nature #tree #age

For whatever time I have to live, I intend to enjoy myself." - Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live. ↗

— Rachele Baker

#cancer #courage #diary #hope #inspirational

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. ↗

— Anthony Bourdain

#food #humor #memoirs #food

In terms of size, mammals are an anomaly, as the vast majority of the world's existing species are snail-sized or smaller. It's almost as if, regardless of your kingdom, the smaller your size & the earlier your place on the tree of life, the more critical is your niche on Earth: snails & worms create soil, & blue-green algae create oxygen; mammals seem comparatively dispensable, the result of the random path of evolution over a luxurious amount of time. ↗

— Elisabeth Tova Bailey

#natural-history #non-fiction #life

Memoirs are a well-known form of fiction. ↗

— Frank Harris

#form #memoirs #well-known

The reader of these Memoirs will discover that I never had any fixed aim before my eyes, and that my system, if it can be called a system, has been to glide away unconcernedly on the stream of life, trusting to the wind wherever it led. ↗

— Giacomo Casanova

#any #away #been #before #called

I love all insider memoirs. It doesn't matter whether it's truck-drivers or doctors. I think everybody likes to go backstage, find out what people think and what they talk about and what specialised job they have. ↗

— David Mamet

#backstage #doctors #everybody #find #go

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#imagination #lack #make #memoirs #people

When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that's Memoirs. ↗

— Will Rogers

#did #done #down #good #good things

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, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios. ↗

— Margery Allingham

#truth #life