Memoir Quotes - Page 9

One last characteristic of the memoir that is important to recognize is one which also applies to essays, and which Georg Lukacs described as "the process of judging." This may seem problematic to some, since...we connect it with 'judgmental,' often used nowadays as a derogatory word. But the kind of judgment necessary to the good personal essay, or to the memoir, is not that nasty tendency to oversimplify and dismiss other people out of hand but rather the willingness to form and express complex opinions, both positive and negative.If the charm of memoir is that we, the readers, see the author struggling to understand her past, then we must also see the author trying out opinions she may later shoot down, only to try out others as she takes a position about the meaning of her story. The memoirist need not necessarily know what she thinks about her subject but she must be trying to find out; she may never arrive at a definitive verdict, but she must be willing to share her intellectual and emotional quest for answers. Without this attempt to make a judgment, the voice lacks interest, the stories, becalmed in the doldrums of neutrality, become neither fiction nor memoir, and the reader loses respect for the writer who claims the privilege of being the hero in her own story without meeting her responsibility to pursue meaning. Self revelation without analysis or understanding becomes merely an embarrassment to both reader and writer.

Judith Barrington

I was always an odd child, though I had no idea what odd was, really.

Patti Larsen

To tell a tale so great as to tear the soul inside out"Sara Niles, Torn From the Inside Out

Sara Niles

...my sisters are tough. Our strength is in our laughter (Dan)

Amanda Welch

I've had cancer twice and if I had to pick one fate for you, cancer or fertility problems-I'd pick cancer.

Kelly Corrigan

Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.

Roberto Bolaño

For the first time I realized adults could back themselves into corners so remote that love, or its memory, could no longer reach them.

Kirby Wright

You wanted to live inside the lines where the ordinariness of everything would protect you from the dragons that lay at the edge of the map ready to blow fire in your face if you strayed off course, to the edge of the known world.

Anne Roiphe

A marriage, willy-nilly, requires you to trust that your spouse will tell your story truthfully and lovingly when you are no longer around to tell it yourself.

Kate Braestrup

As an adult, getting paid thousands of dollars a week to say, “Aye, Sir. Course laid in” is a seriously sweet gig, but when I was a teenager, it sucked.

Wil Wheaton

God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.

Francis Spufford

You know Becky, you haven't been the same since that crowbar fell on your head." - spoken by my mother after I eloped with a guy I'd known for about a month, when I was 18 years old!

Becky Lewellen Povich

I like it here. I like the girls, and I like the DJ's, and the cocktail waitresses, and the loud rock'n'roll (though I would happily beat everyone in Poison to death with the severed limbs of the members of Warrant).

Craig Machen

We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin.

Mary Karr

I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense pretty much.

Marya Hornbacher

Oh my!! How you've grown. Soon you'll be catching the Lord's balls.

Marjane Satrapi

...if that energy could have been channelled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would have lighted up Indochina for a thousand years.

Michael Herr

Had I glimpsed just a little of the suffering I would witness and the heartbreak I would endure, I would have fled in the other direction...But I could not foresee any of these things...And many years later, with tears in my eyes, I remembered my decision to follow this God no matter what the cost.

Daniel Walker

...I really did "choose" to be Jim every single day, but that once I put my sword down I haven't chosen Jenny at all; I simply wake up and here I am.

Jennifer Finney Boylan

Just because you can, doesn't necessarily mean that you should!

Bill Collins

If you can see it, you can achieve it. God helps those who helps themselves. Power is in the act of humility.

Patricia Amis

I am a product of two worlds and each world has given me a reason to love, be kind and grow strong.

Shilpa Raj

There's nothing gay about living life straight

Paul B. Tripp

Just because you can, doesn't necessarily mean that you sh

Bill Collins

When I first met Billy I thought about sucking his eyes right out of their sockets. They’re like turquoise gum drops.

Jo Treggiari

I try to walk around without being noticed but I can’t help attracting attention with my pink Mohawk, black clothing and steel toes, and often I’m with Holly and we’re both tall and arrogant.

Jo Treggiari

Each of us is a book waiting to be written, and that book, if written, results in a person explained.

Thomas M. Cirignano

I learned in therapy the word "No" is a complete sentence.

Jaycee Dugard

I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me. Ah, yes, let me count your cracks. Let's see, one hundred, two... yes, you'll do nicely. A cracked companion makes me look more whole, gives me something outside myself to care for. When I'm with whole, healed people I feel my own cracks, the shatters, the insanities of dislocation in myself.

Julie Gregory

Chasing angels or fleeing demons, go to the mountains.

Jeffrey Rasley

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.

Elbert Hubbard

Into every sunny life a little rain must fall.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

Stephen King

In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.

John Grogan

They had buried him under our elm tree, they said -- yet this was not totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.

Willie Morris

I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.

Marya Hornbacher

Whatever it takes to break your heart and wake you up is grace.

Mark Matousek

Your heart is the size of your fist; keep loving, keep fighting.

Ariel Gore

In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!

Marjane Satrapi

You suffer the blow, but you capitalize on the opportunity left in its wake.

Michael J. Fox

Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free of its gravity, no matter how far I journey.

Hyeonseo Lee

You are putting yourself in serious danger...'I think that I preferred to put myself in serious danger rather than confront my shame. My shame at not having become someone, the shame of not having made my parents proud after all the sacrifices they had made for me. The shame of having become a mediocre nihilist.

Marjane Satrapi

Fact: upon locking yourself our of your apartment you will immediately need to use the bathroom. Fact: and then you will stand in place and watch your door. You will just stare. As though rebuffed by it. As though it has done this to you.

Augusten Burroughs

The greatest challenge of my life has been to see and accept the actual truth without great pain and struggle against it.

M.C. Halliday

The morning opens, a mist of innocence appears across the countryside that tells each one of us the day is new. That feeling of hope, love and the humble awareness of our duty becomes clear if even for a moment. It is that experience of inspiration that follows us into a small town woken by a cool frost on this Sunday morning and the laughter of children playing.

Kris Courtney

… that sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity and self-intoxicated egomania, that drives poets and writers out of their rooms to seek each other out, to rub shoulders with one another, bully, joke, condescend, feel each other, lay a hand on a shoulder or an arm round a waist, to chat and argue with little nudges, to spy a little, sniff out what is cooking in other pots, flatter, disagree, collude, be right, take offence, apologise, make amends, avoid each other, and seek each other’s company again.

Amos Oz

I'm often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.

Haruki Murakami

Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself.In reality, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.

Susanna Kaysen

Lesson learned: Don’t ever put a guy up on a pedestal. It’s too easy for him to tip over and fall off.

Kate Madison

In an attempt to help me move on from my failed marriage, my mom set me up with Jesus Freak. In fact, the stoner hadn’t even finished moving out when she told me not to worry, because she already had someone better lined up for me. I was just lonely and desperate enough to endure a four-month celibate long distance relationship with a guy who read 15 chapters of the Bible and prayed for two hours every day and expected me to follow suit. He wanted to give our hypothetical children Bible names and for us to move to Korea to become missionaries.

Kate Madison

How do we deal with all the people we’ve been? What happens when we have to confront them?

Rachel Kapelke-Dale

When I was about nine, my siblings and I fell out of our moving van at an intersection. My dad didn’t notice for about five blocks. It was back before seat belts. It was also back before parents used any sort of common sense whatsoever. It was a time when you didn’t raise your children. You just fed them and they got bigger.

Dina Kucera

...I am about eight years old when I first become aware of being other--foreign, outside, separate. Because this lesson comes from my own family, it resonates deeper and truer than playground taunts ever have.

Soojung Jo

Anyone who thinks he's too small to make a difference has never been bit by a mosquito", I'd tell people.

Jeannette Walls

How well do you know the people who raised you? Look around your dining room table. Look around at your loved ones, especially the elders. The grandparents and the aunts and uncles who used to give you shiny new quarters and unvarnished advice. How much do you really know about their lives. Perhaps you've heard that they served in a war, or lived for a time in a log cabin, or arrived in this country speaking little or no English. Maybe they survived the Holocaust or the Dust Bowl. How were they shaped by the Depression or the Cold War, or the stutter-step march towards integration in their own community? What were they like before they married or took on mortgages and assumed all the worries that attend the feeding, clothing, and education of their children? If you don't already know the answers, the people who raised you will most likely remain a mystery, unless you take the bold step and say: Tell me more about yourself.

Michele Norris

Telling our personal story reveals the shape shifting landscape of our mind.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Storytelling entails weaving a narrative out of the disturbing, strange, inspirational, and unremarkable detritus of life. By picking among the litter of our personal experiences to select evocative anecdotes to weave into a narrative format, we reveal which of life’s legendary offerings prove the most sublime to us. Acts of omission are momentous. Our narration of personal sketches divulge what factoids inspire us or do not stir us into action, or contain obdurate truths that prove virtually impossible to crack.

Kilroy J. Oldster

However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It’s what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience. The safest memories are locked in the brains of people who can’t remember. Their memories remain the closest replica of actual events. Underwater. Forever.

Lidia Yuknavitch

People naturally impose a narrative story-line upon their experiences. Autobiographical writing allows a person to cast their experiences into a narrative thread and organize their thoughts based not upon conjecture but with applied reason.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Autobiographical writing stands as lasting memorial for enduring the travails of an earthly life. Writing is an apt technique to score our storyline into the annuals of time. To endure a mortal life is merely a transitory experience whereas writing about how one lived is an internalized exposition of what it means to be human. Writing is an external exhibition injecting the author into the world’s consciousness.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Previous 1 … 7 8 9 10 11 … 15 Next

Memoir Quotes - Page 9

Related Topics