Memoir Quotes

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

You are putting yourself in serious danger...'I think that I preferred to put myself in serious dang...

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

In life you'll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it's because they're stupid...

The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look a...

She said, 'No, you learned that you have power - power and determination. I love you and I am proud ...

...if that energy could have been channelled into anything more than noise, waste and pain it would ...

This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us . . ...

William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a...

Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells us his story, I now felt in the writing a c...

Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twel...

Look at what I wrote at the beginning of this memoir. Have I caught anything at all of the extraordi...

Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, abou...

Still, compared to him, compared to the people we descend from, I am free of history. I'm so free of...

Gentleness is given to those who have learned that God will not have his kingdom triumph through the...

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

Free love, man, Free Love! Which, by the way, was the single greatest concept a young man has ever h...

Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.

Here was a Jewish man-turned-woman making fun of Jewish men for not being manly enough.

The camera only documented what had been there all along, a marriage whose foundations, constructed ...

At a crucial point in my early twenties, being able to end a pregnancy had restored to me what I reg...

Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think...

We had deluded ourselves that perhaps peace might find the Arabs able, unhelped and untaught, to def...

I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflect...

If I have been given any gift in this life, it’s my ability to live simultaneously in the rational w...

Learn from your past and be better because of your past, but don't cry about your past. Life is full...

Only, I felt, by some such attempt to write history in terms of personal life could I rescue somethi...

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive...

A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its ...

To me he seemed one of those persons destined to failure of whom you wonder what purpose it can ever...

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention...

You know, everybody's ignorant, just on different subjects.

With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I ...

Memory is each man's own last measure, and for some, the only achievement.

Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: 'In the United St...

This sound, which like all music--indeed, like all pleasure--I had been numbly unresponsive to for m...

Write about small, self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you remember the...

I am not and autobiographical writer--one can't be without a solid and explicable self--and read all...

… that sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity ...

Debbie Downer" was one of the few sketches where I broke, and I remember watching Heratio Sanz laugh...

You can only move if you are actually in the moment. You have to be where you are to get where you n...

I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell the...

Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been...

There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's own experiences so they ...

Pain engraves a deeper memory.

I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other idea...

What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think—the gratit...

The interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid ...

The rock I'd seen in my life looked dull because in all ignorance I'd never thought to knock it open...

[V]alue your dreams but . . . be wary of them also, . . . look for integrity in unusual places.

Those who are close to us, when they die, divide our world. There is the world of the living, which ...

Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren. The poet insi...

Her love of words is a private passion - one she would rather not share. In the house of her childho...

A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are c...

Mr. Schlubb, the pear-shaped PE teacher, sent us all out to run half a dozen laps around a preposter...

What we dedicate today is not a memorial to war, rather it's a tribute to the physical and moral cou...

We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our cont...

You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you wo...

That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand.

I am not here to make you feel better, I am just here to make you feel worse

Answering the question 'How would you like to smell?' by saying 'I'd rather I didn't' is also no lon...

The downside is the fear.The fear of something happening to her, the pressure of there being two bod...

The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing some...

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

Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever ...

The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, w...

There was no better path to autonomy for an ambitious young businesswoman than to be married off to ...

I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American...

I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and clea...

ceremony is essential to humans: It's a circle that we draw around important events to separate the ...

Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women li...

The Buddha taught that most problems - if only you give them enough time and space - will eventually...

All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or ...

How many people have I heard claim their children as the greatest accomplishment and comfort of thei...

In those days, there was no money to buy books.

I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin

You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind....

Ignore the misery. Custom invites you to ignore the misery."SHOW YOUR TONGUE

Popeye the Sailor Man has more cultural longevity. Only women and poofs read or write now. Otherwise...

I'm often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long dis...

The Grim Reaper isn't grim at all; he's a life-saver. He isn't grim because he isn't anything. . . ....

One afternoon as I just gazed at the topmost branches of those immensely tall trees I began to notic...

There occurs the beautiful feeling that only humanity together is the true human being, and that the...

Sometimes I dream that I'm writing a memoir. A memoir would just be the thing to keep me in the hear...

I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul.

If variety is the spice of life, then my life must be one of the spiciest you ever heard of. A curry...

In France, Paul explained, good cooking was regarded as a combination of national sport and high art...

I discovered that when one follows the artist's eye one sees unexpected treasures in so many seeming...

...The more I learned the more I realized how very much one has to know before one is in-the-know at...

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each ...

Many of the people I write about were deliberately left out of the history books that we were forced...

A garden is never finished. In that sense it is like the human world and all human undertakings.

I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.

Disney will never make a movie about my life story, and that's a shame--I'd make a really cute anima...

Change is still resented on the Plains, so much so much so that many small-town people cling to the ...

By the time a town is 75 or 100 years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize the...

More than ever, I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natu...

Once, when I was about ten, we were approaching the ranch after veering north to look at some pastur...