Memoir Quotes - Page 11

• George Bowering doesn’t play fair. Baseball Love is so good there is no memoir in the league that can go up against it. Bowering has a sense of story and an eye for detail that eliminate the possibility that he was a lousy second baseman. Reading a home run is fun.

  Robert Kroetsch

  Baseball, Running, Fun

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• In her memoir, Anne Robinson recounts the wake-up call which motivated her to stop drinking. Leaving her eight-year-old daughter alone in their car while she went to buy liquor, she returned to find her daughter with tears running down her cheeks. The guilt and horror Ms. Robinson felt at this sight jolted her into sobriety.

  Anne Robinson

  Daughter, Running, Drinking

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• Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.

  Patricia Hampl

  Humble, Night, Knitting

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• No one who reads this book will remain unchanged or unaffected-Julene Bair's story arcs from the cornfields of Kansas and Nebraska to the food on our tables and the gas in our cars. There is always a price to be paid, she reminds us, for the pleasures and comforts of this day.  If you read only one memoir this year, this is the one to read and pass along.

  Jonis Agee

  Book, Kansas, Years

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• America is subsidizing what is left of the prestige and strength of the once mighty Britain. The sun has set forever on that monocled, pith-helmeted resident colonialist, sipping tea with his delicate lady in the non-white colonies being systematically robbed of every valuable resource. Britain's superfluous royalty and nobility now exist by charging tourists to inspect the once baronial castles, and by selling memoirs, perfumes, autographs, titles, and even themselves.

  Malcolm X

  White, America, Forever

  Malcolm X (2015). “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, p.292, Ballantine Books

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• One thing you will discover is that life is based less than you think on what you’ve learned and much more than you think on what you have inside you from the beginning." Memoir From Antproof Case

  Mark Helprin

  Thinking, Life Is, Cases

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• I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.

  David Mitchell

  Book, Hero, Journey

  David Mitchell (2008). “Cloud Atlas: A Novel”, p.169, Random House

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• I put off writing the first Left Behind book for a year because I got invited to assist Billy Graham in his memoirs, and had we known what we were putting off for a year, we might not have put it off.

  Jerry B. Jenkins

  Book, Writing, Years

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• Now I say I'm a diarist with an explanation I'll get back to you on. Someday I may try and write in memoir form.

  Carrie Fisher

  Writing, Trying, May

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• I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.

  Pauline Kael

  Writing, Thinking

  Pauline Kael (1996). “Conversations with Pauline Kael”, p.21, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• 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

  Lying, Writing, Eight

  Margery Allingham (1959). “Crime and Mr. Campion”

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• I think most memoirs, though they purport to be about this particular time or this person you met, are really about the effect that person or time had on you.

  Rosemary Mahoney

  Thinking, Mets, Persons

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• The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.

  Michiko Kakutani

  Art, Redemption, Crafts

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• It's easy to write one's memoirs when one has a terrible memory.

  Arthur Schnitzler

  Memories, Writing, Easy

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• I dont know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, its always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.

  Koren Zailckas

  Writing, Ideas, Cracks

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• A Diogenesian search for an honest person would rarely lead to the author of a memoir.

  Tony Blankley

  Political, Honest, Persons

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• The journey toward authenticity, toward becoming whole is made palpable in Maureen Seaton's Sex Talks to Girls: A Memoir. It shines its considerable light on the passage from religion toward faith, from self-medication to sobriety, from daughterhood to motherhood, from being the disembodied 'good girl' to embracing her own bad lesbian self. In crisp chapters, Seaton leads us, step-by-step, over this harrowing and blissful road, so distinct from yet so much like our own.

  Terry Wolverton

  Girl, Sex, Motherhood

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• Clyde Phillip Wachsberger's delightful memoir about tending beds of flowers as compensation for a lonely middle age only to find unexpected romance along the way is a sweet reminder that, as he puts it, 'anything can happen in a garden.' In prose that balances candor with perfect courtesy, he charms us with the message that keeping a garden with a beloved companion, this most ephemeral of all the arts, can bring us the most enduring joys and pleasures.

  Philip Gambone

  Lonely, Sweet, Art

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• Listen, in England people are already writing their memoirs at the age of 23.

  Rupert Everett

  Writing, People, Age

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• It's a rare memoir that can tell a story that seems brand new, but Nina Here Nor There does it. This one-of-a-kind narrator undertakes a quest that is unmistakably timely. But in its yearning for awareness and connection, this book feels timeless.

  K. M. Soehnlein

  Book, Narrators, Connections

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• I've read my grandmother's memoirs and she served as a nurse during World War II. What they had to do was incredible.

  Jessica Brown Findlay

  War, Grandmother, Nurse

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Robert Spencer, a prolific anti-Islam writer and a leading Islamophobe who is bent on distorting Islam and demonizing Muslims, has persistently argued that violence and terrorism employed by Muslim extremists is rooted in the Quran and its message. Spencer calls the Quran, a book sacred to Muslim, 'the jihadists' Mein Kampf,' in reference to Hitler's memoir.

  Louay M. Safi

  Book, Muslim Extremists, Islam

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• Defining oneself is a revolutionary act, and, as described in her memoir, Janet Mock fiercely fought to free herself with exquisite bravery and sensitivity. Redefining Realness is full of hope, dreams, and determination. It is a true American girl story.

  Michaela Angela Davis

  Girl, Dream, Determination

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• Voice is the je ne sais quoi of spirited writing. It separates brochures and brilliance, memo and memoir, a ship's log and The Old Man and the Sea. The best writers stamp prose with their own distinctive personality; their timbre and tone are as recognizable as their voices on the phone. To cultivate voice, you must listen for the music of language-the vernacular, the syntactic tics, the cadences.

  Constance Hale

  Writing, Men, Sea

  Constance Hale (2001). “Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose”, Broadway

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

  Carly Fiorina

  Book, Novelists, Wells

  "RCP Newsmaker Interview With Carly Fiorina". RealClearPolitics Interview, www.realclearpolitics.com. August 5, 2010.

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