Best 1003 quotes in «memoir quotes» category

I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.

I don't like that word [memoir]. Whenever my publishers have wanted to use it, I've told them to take it away.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.

I could have written a misery memoir and instead I tried to make it funny. I never complained.

I don't like talking about myself; I like to let the music be the spokesperson for me. So doing a memoir and all that chronological 'and then this happened and then blah blah' doesn't appeal to me that much. I think there's more mystique in what you don't know about.

I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.

I was inspired by my life. I was inspired by the lives of many women doctors around me. So [Memoirs of a Woman Doctor ] is a mixture.

Of all the many memoirs by former Soviet officials, Palazchenko's is among the best written and also the most objective. Even his descriptions of U.S. policy are more accurate and judicious than those of some American scholars.

Memoir is about handing over you life to someone and saying, This is what I went through, this is who I am, and maybe you can learn something from it.

Obviously memoir is subjective truth: It is my memory, my perspective, that's the beauty. But I still wanted to be as factual as I could.

Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.

Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.

One thing about humans is that we all have them - lifestories. We live by and through them. But writers of memoir are particularly good at bringing literary strategies and form to experience (at least the good ones are).

The memoir as a somewhat indistinct form is absolutely true. So many of the memoirs I've read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir and the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.

The stupidest thing that a writer can do is write a memoir I think, unless it's right before you die -- maybe.

This week Sarah Palin's memoir became a bestseller. It's not even out yet. It's being translated into English.

As Samson demonstrated, going bald ruins lives.

When Goldie Hawn wrote her memoirs, no one said Goldie Hawn was snitching. When Jane Fonda wrote her memoirs, no one said Jane Fonda was snitching.

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

Absolutely devout in her complete care of my body, she had only taught me to be weak and voiceless. But I had unlearned that lesson. Our enmeshment no longer felt to me like proof of love. I was no longer willing to permit this silencing. Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing—able—to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed her to help me, to take care of things for me—and to save me—but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it.

Actions are prayers too, and as I am trying, not always successfully, to be a good parent, a good husband, a good teacher, I sometimes think: this is my conversation with God. It seems to me now that the action of walking to Santiago was, in itself, a prayer – a prayer repeatedly and resoundingly answered. Benjamin is an answered prayer, of course, but so was James. He just wasn’t the answer we expected.

Acts of love, for me, are leaps of bravery.

A favorite pastime of soldiers on long mounted patrols was testing each other with impossible hypotheticals. They were an endearing yet vulgar form of moral drama, but only because the alternative was to contemplate being blown up by an illiterate goat herder’s morning project. “What would you rather do, have sex with your sister or shoot your mother?” “Would you rather pick up a baby with a pitchfork, or throw a paraplegic in a fire?” In one form or another, these young men were weighing the relative value of human life in real terms, perhaps as a surrogate for murkier thoughts that might otherwise be in the forefront, such as, “Why am I risking my life in this wasteland?” or “Whose life is worth more, that of my best friend in the gun turret or of some Iraqi kid I’ve never met?” It passed the time.

After a lifetime of soft, easy living in the West, one's buttocks take an awful hammering out here. Backpacking around India is just one long round of sitting on bone-hard, chafing, bruising and generally uncomfortable seats-whether in buses our trains, or restaurants or cinemas. There is no such thing as a padded seat in the whole country.

After college I got a job and started working. This new career had absolutely nothing to do with my degree.

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

After twelve years of trying, I just decided to stop missing.

All I could think as he was speaking was that, if he touched me at all, all the miles I’d walked, the pain I’d felt, the beauty I’d drunken like milk, like good wine making me happy, the four million steps I’d taken, would all add up to nothing. They’d be stolen.

Alone, I relished the bird songs, the drone of hushed conversation from neighboring tables, and the gentle lapping of waves sliding on the shore. I didn't feel the passage of time. There was no destination propelling me forward, no past and no future. Each glorious moment was replaced by the next.

A lot of men tend to want "models" I tell men, unless they look like a model themselves, they can't expect to land one.

Always remember that your memoir is never about you. It's about your reader. At it's core, it's about that shared space where we all experience the timeless truths of what it means to be human.

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.

A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

And Goneville? It is a name that kept coming up as I was writing this book, and each time its meaning shifted a little. It's almost Gonville, the suburb of Whanganui where Johnny Devlin, New Zealand's first rock 'n'roll star, grew up, so arguably the birthplace of New Zealand rock 'n'roll. But it is also an imaginary place that might be every obscure New Zealand town that every obscure New Zealand band ever played.

And I was cooking for three, and teaching, and taking care of a man who’d just collapsed in my house; learning to cook like June Cleaver didn’t exactly seem an option.

And of course that was an Amaryllis that was never going to exist, one that I could never talk to or thank. I longed for her, even though I only knew her through her words.

And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path – the one, natural, trodden way.

And the idea of light unexplainably produced out of nothing was haunting, it shook me. A flat drab mountain could produce its own light, no one in this whole world knows why, and if that was possible then of course there must be other things that seemed impossible that weren’t, and so anything—great and terrible—felt possible to me now.

And there were the warm spaces in the music I loved the most, openings through which I could enter and lay my burdens down. There, behind the groove and riding on the melody, I was complete and free.

Anger tried to help me feel better about myself by pushing the blame onto someone else.

Another note to self; turn cellphone to silent when you’re trying to be sneaky.

Answering the question 'How would you like to smell?' by saying 'I'd rather I didn't' is also no longer acceptable. It's not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic pot too - it's seen as almost un-feminist not to. What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations - millennia - to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone.

Anyone can choose to have success, but only the patient ones will get rewarded by it. Be relentless in chasing your dreams.

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

As a dyslexic with rapid thought, my hands often fly over the page way too fast, and my typing isn’t much better.

...A secure future seemed mapped out for me. Too secure, too mapped out. If I carried on in medicine, I realized I'd have a pretty good idea exactly what I'd be doing ten, twenty and even thirty years from that moment. It struck me like a halibut from the North Sea that that was not the way my life should go at all. What was the point of working on through the age of sixty-five and taking a chance on a better reincarnation next time?

As I searched for food perfection, and as I gained weight, I began to realize that the race for perfection in anything was the path to destruction.

As I travelled south through Europe everything got bigger. This applied to nice things like fruit-the nectarines and tomatoes were about six times as large in Greece as they were in Britain for example. But the principle also applied to unpleasant things, like spiders, and worms, and all other nameless and horrifying insects and arachnids of Greece.

Ask not what your Joe Montaperto can do for you, but rather what YOU can do for your Joe Montaperto.

As the silence returned, I sat back and felt the tension ease away; I hadn’t even known I was tense. A few moments passed and once again the cycling fan laced in with the clanging chains and mixed with the rumbling mower and the buzzing insects.