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For an inspirational lift or a grace note in your promotional materials you can’t beat a good quotation. Over the years I’ve amassed a collection of quotes that relate to life stories and I’m pleased to share them with you here. I’ve assembled the first fifteen on this page. For the remaining thirty-five be sure to click on the link at the bottom . Enjoy!
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Memoir writing, gathering words onto pieces of paper, helps me shape my life to a manageable size. By discovering plot, arc, theme, and metaphor, I offer my life an organization, a frame, which would be otherwise unseen, unknown. Memoir creates a narrative, a life story. Writing my life is a gift I give to myself. To write is to be constantly reborn. On one page I understand this about myself. On the next page, I understand that.
from Sue William Silverman’s Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir (U of Georgia, 2009)
It’s not about dinner but the kind of conversations you have with your family and the stories you tell.
Robyn Fivush, Professor of Psychology, Emory University
If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.
Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973), American writer
Anyone who’s fortunate enough to live to be 50 years old should take some time, even if it’s just a couple of weekends, to sit down and write the story of your life, even if it’s only twenty pages, and even if it’s only for your children and grandchildren.
former President Bill Clinton
To forget one’s ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.
Do not wait; the time will never be “just right.” Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.
George Herbert (1593 – 1633), a Welsh poet, orator, and priest
The positive thing about writing is that you connect with yourself in the deepest way, and that’s heaven. You get a chance to know who you are, to know what you think. You begin to have a relationship with your mind.
Natalie Goldberg, writer, Zen practitioner, and teacher
When you speak or write in your own voice you become subject rather than object. You transform your own destiny.
bell hooks, American author, feminist, and social activist
It seems that the ancient Medicine Men understood that listening to another’s story somehow gives us the strength of example to carry on, as well as showing us aspects of ourselves we can’t easily see. For listening to the stories of others – not to their precautions or personal commandments – is a kind of water that breaks the fever of our isolation. If we listen closely enough, we are soothed into remembering our common name.
from The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo
One regret I have: I didn’t get as much of the family history as I could have for the kids.
Robert De Niro, American actor, director, and producer
Ultimately, the richest resource for meaning and healing is one we already posses. It rests (mostly untapped) in the material of our own lifestory, in the sprawling, many-layered “text” that has been accumulating within us across the years.
from Restorying Our Lives: Personal Growth through Autobiographical Reflection by Kenyon, Gary M., and William L. Randall (1997)
Your story, it’s not boring and ordinary, by the way. We just get the one life, you know. Just one. You can’t live someone else’s or think it’s more important just because it’s more dramatic. What happens matters, maybe only to us, but it matters.
from the movie Ghost Town
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.
Isaac Asimov (c. 1920 – 1992), science fiction writer
The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804 – 1881), British statesman who served twice as Prime Minister
The longer we listen to one another – with real attention – the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.
Barbara Deming (1917 – 1984), American feminist and advocate of nonviolent social change
…and there’s more here!
Photo by iStockphoto
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Memoir writing, gathering words onto pieces of paper, helps me shape my life to a manageable size. By discovering plot, arc, theme, and metaphor, I offer my life an organization, a frame, which would be otherwise unseen, unknown. Memoir creates a narrative, a life story. Writing my life is a gift I give to myself. To write is to be constantly reborn. On one page I understand this about myself. On the next page, I understand that.
~ from Sue William Silverman’s Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir (U of Georgia, 2009)
If you’ve been contemplating the writing of your own life story, this observation by Sue Silverman may convince you to start. The effort it takes to craft the work is more than amply rewarded by seeing your life, often for the first time, as a coherent and intricate pattern.
Photo by Colin Campbell
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It’s not about dinner but the kind of conversations you have with your family and the stories you tell.
Robyn Fivush ~ Professor of Psychology, Emory University
“The family is the first and most enduring group you belong to,” says Barbara Fiese, a psychology professor at Syracuse University. “It provides a sense of belonging for children, adolescents and adults so the individual doesn’t have to feel isolated.”
We help create this bond by sharing our family stories from the past and the present. Research conducted by Dr. Robyn Fivush shows that parents who take the time to tell their children about family events, inside jokes, nicknames and family successes and failures produce adolescents with higher self-esteem and self-confidence.
We owe it to our children not only to make dinner a time for the family to gather but also a time to share the richness of our family stories.
Photo by Kirsten Jennings
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We see the world not as it is but as we are.
Anaïs Nin ~ (1903 – 1977) was a Cuban-Spanish-French author.
We all see the world differently because of our unique upbringing, values and beliefs. I’m sometimes asked if we should be aiming for the truth in telling someone’s life story. I believe that as much as possible we should get locations, dates and names down accurately. But how a person recollects the unfolding of events is not for us to question. People in the same family will often interpret things differently. And that’s okay. Our work in recording and preserving a life story is to do justice to the telling of one person’s life as he or she perceives it.
Photo by Bob Prosser
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I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.
- Chinese Proverb
As a personal historian, I write a good deal about the need to record and preserve memories. It’s important that we remember our stories and the stories of those who’ve come before. What this proverb reminds me of is that doing a personal history of a family member also leads to greater awareness of who that person is. I recall that interviewing my mother for a book on her life made me come to understand her much more than I had previously. Her concerns, values and motivations all made much more sense to me.
When we help someone with their life story we also benefit from this undertaking.
Photo by Daniel Greene
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To climb steep hills requires a slow pace at first.
- William Shakespeare
Sometimes when we look at the work involved in telling our life story or that of another, we can become overwhelmed. It seems too monumental and so we give up before we ever get started. I’m a great believer in starting slow. Don’t feel you have to rush into a life story and have it completed in a week or two. You might begin by reading some useful books on how to write a life story. I wrote a previous post,The Ten Best Selling Books on Life Story Writing, which you can find by clicking here.
You might start by writing little sketches as Anna Mary Moses did in her wonderful autobiography, Grandma Moses: My Life’s Story. She said, “I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday, as I have thought of it, as I remember all the things from childhood on through the years, good ones, and unpleasant ones, that is how they come out and that is how we have to take them.”
The other piece of advice I have is that you set aside some time each day to write. It doesn’t have to be much time, perhaps a half-hour. What’s important is that you develop the habit of sitting down to write each day.
Good luck with your writing. Tell me any other approaches you’ve used for starting slow.
Photo by Stan Hieronymus
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If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.
Pearl S. Buck – (1892-1973) American writer
Preparing our personal history offers us the opportunity to look back on all our yesterdays. By doing so, we come to see more clearly how we got to where we are, the values that have inspired us along the way and what wisdom we’ve accumulated. A clearer understanding of our past helps us better navigate our future course.
Photo by Markus M.
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Anyone who’s fortunate enough to live to be 50 years old should take some time, even if it’s just a couple of weekends, to sit down and write the story of your life, even if it’s only twenty pages, and even if it’s only for your children and grandchildren.
~ former President Bill Clinton
Clinton’s point that you don’t have to write your life story in epic form is a good one. Some people become immobilized by the overwhelming thought that they have to write at least a 200-page masterpiece and so nothing gets written. The truth is that anything you can put down is better than nothing.
Photo by Eve
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To forget one’s ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.
- Chinese proverb
How many of you can name all of your eight great grandparents? That’s the question posed by Dr. Barry Baines at one of his Ethical Will Workshops. I must admit I can only name one. How about you? Probably very few – right? Think for a moment. If you don’t do something to preserve and record your life story then your children’s grandchildren will not know your name. Pretty sobering isn’t it? What are you doing to ensure that your name isn’t forgotten?
Photo by David Fielke
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The beginning of a habit is like an invisible thread, but every time we repeat the act we strengthen the strand, add to it another filament, until it becomes a great cable and binds us irrevocably, thought and act.
Orison Swett Marden (1850 – 1924) was an American writer.
Writing your life story can seem daunting. But one way to get the work done is to develop the habit of writing. You can set an amount of time that you’ll write each day. Let’s say you decide to do 30 minutes. Find an uninterrupted part of your day, set a timer and sit and write until the 30 minutes is up. Don’t worry about how your writing is progressing – just write. Keep to whatever time you’ve set – no more or no less.
Likewise you could decide to write one page a day. The trick is to continue writing until your page is full. Don’t start and then go off shopping and come back and finish the page. Do your writing in one sitting.
After you’ve developed the habit of writing you’ll find that it seems less a chore. And the bonus lies in the fact that bit by bit you’ll get your life story completed.
Photo by Pete Lambert
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