Memoir Quotes - Page 4

• The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.

  Vivian Gornick

  Desire, Fiction, Ends

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• All the authors who've ultimately published Louder Than Words memoirs have been very happy to be chosen and excited about the possibility of having their memoir published. Even though these books deal with serious, often painful, issues, in all cases the authors felt as though writing their story would be an empowering and healing experience.

  Deborah Reber

  Book, Healing, Writing

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• My memoir is about my time in film and the decision to leave Hollywood, grow up, and stop pretending.

  Lisa Jakub

  Growing Up, Decision, Hollywood

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• My memoir is being published by Beaufort Books and will be available fall of 2015. Its about my unusual life as a child actor and how I made the unpopular choice to leave Hollywood, grow up, and stop pretending.

  Lisa Jakub

  Children, Growing Up, Book

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• Cheryl Strayed reminds us, in her lyrical and courageous memoir Wild, of what it means to be fully alive, even in the face of catastrophe, physical and psychic hardship, and loss.

  Mira Bartok

  Mean, Loss, Psychics

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• Fiorito has all the right stuff. His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.

  Mordecai Richler

  Father, Dying, Ashes

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• I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.

  Vivian Gornick

  Order, Firsts, Produce

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• When I became a feminist, when the movement started in the late sixties, I started writing because I had something urgent to say. My first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is the product of that urgency.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Queens, Writing, Prom Queen

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• The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you're writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means - the form follows function.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Mean, Wish

  "Harlan Ellison, Part Two". Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. June 08, 2008.

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• I believe the personal is the collective. One of the ironies of writing memoir is in using the "I" it becomes an alchemical "we." This is the sorcery of literature.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Believe, Writing, Sorcery

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I read a lot. I especially read memoirs and biographies. It's very helpful when you're thinking about what's possible and what exists in human behavior; if it exists out there then it can exist on the stage. I really try to go to a lot of concerts. A lot of live events. I just try to keep my ears really, really open.

  Jeanine Tesori

  Thinking, Trying, Events

  "Composer Jeanine Tesori on Her Artistic Process and Rewarding Female Ambition". Interview with Victoria Myers, www.indiewire.com. March 27, 2015.

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• I think people dismiss celebrity memoirs as unreal, contrived and maybe partially made up. But that's definitely not true for anything that I write.

  Hilary Liftin

  Writing, Thinking, People

  "'Getting to Take on That Life Temporarily'". Interview with Kathryn Borel, Jr., logger.believermag.com. July 21, 2015.

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• I do not repeat conversations that I can't remember. And it's something that irritates me a great deal, because I think most memoirs are false novels.

  Paul Auster

  Thinking, Remember, Conversation

  Interview with Lotte Hansen, www.timeout.com.

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• It's beyond the grasp of anyone's memory to recall conversations in kind of [memoir] detail. So it's fake. It's all made up.

  Paul Auster

  Memories, Fake, Details

  Time Out Interview, www.timeout.com.

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• Kerry Cohen's powerful, transfixing story will be familiar to many women, most of whom won't want to admit it. In this heartfelt and authentic memoir, Cohen transcends the pain and shame of a promiscuous past, and leaves readers with a sense of hope and triumph.

  Janice Erlbaum

  Pain, Powerful, Past

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• I wish I had read Sacred Pregnancy when I was pregnant instead of the dozen books I had to piece together to try to make sense of it all. Anni Daulter has created what should be the new standard for today's mom: birth journals, labor workbooks, pregnancy memoirs, and holistic wisdom. It is gentle and enlightening, and lays the foundation for what we know helps women have the labor and birth they want and deserve: support, self-knowledge, and empowerment.

  Mayim Bialik

  Mom, Pregnancy, Book

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• A man who leaves memoirs, whether well or badly written, provided they be sincere, renders a service to future psychologists and writers, giving them not only a faithful picture, but likewise human documents that may be relied upon.

  Henryk Sienkiewicz

  Men, Giving, Faithful

  Henryk Sienkiewicz (1897). “Without Dogma: A Novel of Modern Poland”

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• We all have love stories that go terribly wrong; we all have horribly broken hearts. And somehow we endure. We're not destroyed by it. We endure and go on to do interesting things and have worthy lives, even though we carry our heartbreaks with us. That's a kind of personal story of mine that I don't think I would tell in memoir but I do think I can tell in fiction.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Heart, Thinking, Interesting

  "Elizabeth Gilbert, ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ Author, On What It Takes To Get Inspired". Interview with Chantal Pierrat, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 11, 2013.

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• I have been reading Madame Roland's memoirs and have come to the conclusion that she was a very over-rated woman; snobbish, vain, sentimental, envious - rather a German type. Her last days before her execution were spent in chronicling petty social snubs or triumphs of many years back. She was a democrat chiefly from envy of the noblesse.

  Madame Roland

  Reading, Years, Envy

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• I can’t help thinking about memoir as a down-and-up process: Dive down for color; come up for context. Sink back down for action; climb back up for self-awareness and gratitude.

  Koren Zailckas

  Gratitude, Thinking, Self

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• Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White is remarkable for its truth-telling about two important issues concerning Alabama's past and present: the civil rights movement and immigration. These stories, rendered through the words and eyes of a young Latina girl who came from Argentina to Marion, Alabama, are made vivid and immediate through Weaver's highly accessible drawings and dialogue. This is a book-about maturation, family, education, and social change-every schoolchild, parent, and citizen should experience.

  Sena Jeter Naslund

  Girl, Book, Eye

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• I was always much impressed, in reading prison memoirs of revolutionists, such as Lenin and Trotsky ... by the amount of reading they did, the languages they studied, the range of their plans for a better social order. (Or rather, for a new social order.) In the Acts of the Apostles there are constant references to the Way and the New Man.

  Dorothy Day

  Reading, Men, Order

  "On Pilgrimage". "Catholic Worker", December 1968.

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• Frank Berliners spiritual memoir is beautifully crafted and written. It is a tale about love, and the great longing that springs from there—to learn, to grow, to be real, and to forge a genuine connection with oneself and others, with life, and with death. I highly recommend it.

  John Welwood

  Spiritual, Spring, Real

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• Buonaparte is certainly writing, or rather dictating, his memoirs. He walks backwards and forwards with his hands behind him, and dictates so fast that two or three of his suite are obliged to be in attendance, that the one may take down one-half of a sentence, and another the rest; they then literally compare notes, and put the disjointed legs and wings and heads of periods together. This is writing a book as he fought a battle.

  Mary Russell Mitford

  Book, Writing, Wings

  Mary Russell Mitford (1870). “The Life of Mary Russell Mitford ; Related in an Selection from Her Letters to Her Friends. Ed. by A.G. Estrange”, p.7

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• The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoir that fits us all.

  Patricia Hampl

  Humble, Hands, Poetry

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