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4187428 In life you'll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it's because they're stupid. That will help keep you from reacting to their cruelty. Because there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance... Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself. young_adult memoir Marjane Satrapi
2368220 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. inspirational running memoir Haruki Murakami
db9fa27 "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. memoir mental-illness Susanna Kaysen
22f78a9 "Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, "We *told* you not to tell." But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on." memories writing advice getting-started memoir remembering childhood incest memory Anne Lamott
5813cfb 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. young_adult memoir Marjane Satrapi
35c789c "I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down." memories writing encouragement child young memoir childhood writers Anne Lamott
960e208 I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life. memoir bipolar-disorder mental-illness Marya Hornbacher
29b22a3 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. inspirational journalism memoir John Grogan
9ad027f In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves! young_adult memoir Marjane Satrapi
2220768 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. memoir marya-hornbacher wasted eating-disorder bulimia Marya Hornbacher
befcf8a The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners... honesty truth raw memoir Natalie Goldberg
0ca5e2a We mask our needs as the needs of others. memoir Terry Tempest Williams
360c3ca In those days, there was no money to buy books. reading memoir Ernest Hemingway
b1f8304 Oh my!! How you've grown. Soon you'll be catching the Lord's balls. humor young_adult memoir Marjane Satrapi
c08f235 A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space where we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully. Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover. feminism writing memoir bell hooks
c68df56 Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent. perseverance celebrity-memoir creativity-and-attitude talent memoir creativity Steve Martin
c46fdd8 The dizzy rapture of starving. The power of needing nothing. By force of will I make myself the impossible sprite who lives on air, on water, on purity. kathryn-harrison the-kiss memoir Kathryn Harrison
3f8798d What can we make of the inexpressible joy of children? It is a kind of gratitude, I think--the gratitude of the ten-year-old who wakes to her own energy and the brisk challenge of the world. You thought you knew the place and all its routines, but you see you hadn't known. Whole stacks at the library held books devoted to things you knew nothing about. The boundary of knowledge receded, as you poked about in books, like Lake Erie's rim as you climbed its cliffs. And each area of knowledge disclosed another, and another. Knowledge wasn't a body, or a tree, but instead air, or space, or being--whatever pervaded, whatever never ended and fitted into the smallest cracks and the widest space between stars. gratitude joy wonder knowledge memoir childhood Annie Dillard
9a5fca1 "How many people have I heard claim their children as the greatest accomplishment and comfort of their lives? It's the thing they can always lean on during a metaphysical crisis, or a moment of doubt about their relevancy - If I have done nothing else in this life, then at least I have raised my children well. But what if, either by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this comforting cycle of family and continuity? What if you step out? Where do you sit at the reunion? How do you mark time's passage without the fear that you've just fritted away your time on earth without being relevant? You'll need to find another purpose, another measure by which to judge whether or not you have been a successful human being. I love children, but what if I don't have any? What kind of person does that make me? Virginia Woolf wrote, "Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword." On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where "all is correct." But on the other side of that sword, if you're crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, "all is confusion. Nothing follows a regular course." Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a far more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will also be more perilous." elizabeth-gilbert virginia-woolf memoir Elizabeth Gilbert
9d1e581 Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre. blog depression writing blogger insomnia memoir bipolar-disorder recovery mental-health interview Andy Behrman
2c4fb0a You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life. memoir Abigail Thomas
e343e6a Those who are close to us, when they die, divide our world. There is the world of the living, which we finally, in one way or another, succumb to, and then there is the domain of the dead that, like an imaginary friend (or foe) or a secret concubine, constantly beckons, reminding us of our loss. What is memory but a ghost that lurks at the corners of the mind, interrupting our normal course of life, disrupting our sleep in order to remind us of some acute pain or pleasure, something silenced or ignored? We miss not only their presence, or how they felt about us, but ultimately how they allowed us to feel about ourselves or them. (prologue) mother-daughter-relationship father-daughter-relationship iran iranian-revolution memoir Azar Nafisi
0dce06b We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin. memoirs memoir Mary Karr
1103c2a Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren. The poet insists, language is a body of suffering and when you take up language you take up the suffering too. All my life I have been suffering for words. Words have been the source of the pain and the way to heal. Struck as a child for talking, for speaking out of turn, for being out of my place. Struck as a grown woman for not knowing when to shut up, for not being willing to sacrifice words for desire. Struck by writing a book that disrupts. There are many ways to be hit. Pain is the price we pay to speak the truth. poetry writing memoir Bell Hooks
7d22fed Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family's history. memoir Elizabeth Gilbert
58c8c8b If I have been given any gift in this life, it's my ability to live simultaneously in the rational world and the world of imagination. inspirational memoir Tom Robbins
ca299f6 Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone. frances-mayes forgiveness-quotes childhood-trauma southern southerners memoir father Frances Mayes
e09115b The philosopher Odo Marquard has noted a correlation in the German language between the word zwei, which means 'two,' and the word zweifel, which means 'doubt' - suggesting that two of anything brings the automatic possibility of uncertainty to our lives. Now imagine a life in which every day a person is presented with not two or even three but dozens of choices, and you can begin to grasp why the modern world has become, even with all its advantages, a neurosis-generating machine of the highest order. In a world of such abundant possibility, many of us simply go limp from indecision. Or we derail our life's journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time. Or we become compulsive comparers - always measuring our lives against some other person's life, secretly wondering if we should have taken her path instead. memoir Elizabeth Gilbert
45c5c3c The interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid story; it even begins to hear rumors, from beyond the horizon skin's rim, of nations and wars. You wake one day and discover your grandmother; you wake another day and notice, like any curious naturalist, the boys. connection boys memoir sexuality Annie Dillard
ce26af6 "I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him--they were part of his "road," the infinite range of experience that always had to remain open to fuel his work." love pisces memoir writers Joyce Johnson
3ed01af The Buddha taught that most problems - if only you give them enough time and space - will eventually wear themselves out. memoir Elizabeth Gilbert
9bae625 ceremony is essential to humans: It's a circle that we draw around important events to separate the momentous from the ordinary. And ritual is a sort of magical safety harness that guides us from one stage of our lives into the next, making sure we don't stumble or lose ourselves along the way. Ceremony and ritual march us carefully right through the center of our deepest fears about change... memoir Elizabeth Gilbert
96ab2e9 The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely. sedaris naked memoir David Sedaris
207edfd Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass. memoir Mary Karr
6b1a8b0 A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world. memoir memory Arthur Golden
82581a3 autism is more like retina patterns than measles david-mitchell memoir Naoki Higashida
da82568 There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's own experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least, in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured. travel writing memoir Anne Morrow Lindbergh
5217ad4 So they all went away from the little log house. The shutters were over the windows, so the little house could not see them go. It stayed there inside the log fence, behind the two big oak trees that in the summertime had made green roofs for Mary and Laura to play under. And that was the last of the little house. little-house-on-the-prairie memoir Laura Ingalls Wilder
d9d7626 There was no time to lose, no time to waste in rest or play. The life of the earth comes up with a rush in the springtime. little-house-on-the-prairie memoir Laura Ingalls Wilder
34c9044 The rock I'd seen in my life looked dull because in all ignorance I'd never thought to knock it open. People have cracked ordinary New England pegmatite - big, coarse granite - and laid bare clusters of red garnets, or topaz crystals, chrysoberyl, spodumene, emerald. They held in their hands crystals that had hung in a hole in the dark for a billion years unseen. I was all for it. I would lay about me right and left with a hammer, and bash the landscape to bits. I would crack the earth's crust like a pinata and spread to the light the vivid prizes in chunks within. Rock collecting was opening the mountains. It was like diving through my own interior blank blackness to remember the startling pieces of a dream: there was a blue lake, a witch, a lighthouse, a yellow path. It was like poking about in a grimy alley and finding an old, old coin. Nothing was at it seemed. The earth was like a shut eye. Mother's not dead, dear - she's only sleeping. Pry open the thin lid and find a crystalline intelligence inside, a rayed and sidereal beauty. Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetical flowers. They lengthened and spread, adding plane to plane in awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even the stones - maybe only the stones - understood. discovery wonder rock-collecting rocks geology memoir Annie Dillard
92f9d33 Joy, it is, which I've never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self - delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving. memoirs memoir Mary Karr
40735cd l ymkn llHb 'n ykwn mbkran 'bdan memoir Isabel Allende
297700d The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead. memoirs memoir Mary Karr
70f0a5e Tomorrow! How sweet its prospects for a drunkard the night before. There is no better word. Before the earth hurls itself into sunshine, nothing is not possible. memoirs memoir Mary Karr
a000d71 Well, did anything interesting happen today?' [my father] would begin. And even before the daily question was completed I had eagerly launched into my narrative of every play, and almost every pitch, of that afternoon's contest. It never crossed my mind to wonder if, at the close of a day's work, he might find my lengthy account the least bit tedious. For there was mastery as well as pleasure in our nightly ritual. Through my knowledge, I commanded my father's undivided attention, the sign of his love. It would instill in me an early awareness of the power of narrative, which would introduce a lifetime of storytelling, fueled by the naive confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my father did. family memoir Doris Kearns Goodwin
70368af During these three months I have gone through much; I mean, I have gone through much in myself; and now there are the things I am going to see and go through. There will be much to be written. memoir Fyodor Dostoyevsky
10fd338 I had a head for religious ideas. They were the first ideas I ever encountered. They made other ideas seem mean....I had miles of Bible in memory: some perforce, but most by hap, like the words to songs. There was no corner of my brain where you couldn't find, among the files of clothing labels and heaps of rocks, among the swarms of protozoans and shelves of novels, whole tapes and snarls and reels of Bible. religion ideas memoir memory Annie Dillard
127488c All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life without having babies. memoir Elizabeth Gilbert
47220ec Her love of words is a private passion - one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they would search and find the hidden places. Her written words, discovered, read were just the source of more pain and punishment. This was why she loved poetry. They did not always understand it so they left it alone. poetry writing memoir Bell Hooks
fbe6041 "Now that young girls like my twelve-year-old friend Mai are being exposed to modern Western women like me through crowds of tourists, they're experiencing those first critical moments of cultural hesitation. I call this the "Wait-a-Minute Moment" - that pivotal instant when girls from traditional cultures start pondering what's in it for them, exactly, to be getting married at the age of thirteen and starting to have babies not long after. They start wondering if they might prefer to make different choices for themselves, or any choices, for that matter. Once girls from closed societies start thinking such thoughts, all hell breaks loose." memoir Elizabeth Gilbert
34f6cec "Anyone who thinks he's too small to make a difference has never been bit by a mosquito", I'd tell people." voting memoir Jeannette Walls
bf18146 I was struck - not for the first time in my years of travel - by how isolating contemporary American society can seem by comparison. Where I came from, we have shriveled down the notion of what constitutes 'a family unit' to such a tiny scale that it would probably be unrecognizable as a family to anybody in one of these big, loose, enveloping Hmong clans. You almost need an electron microscope to study the modern Western family these days. hmong memoir Elizabeth Gilbert
b452748 "Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called "Rushdie," and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroes, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd." -- war history religion averroës ibn-rushd fatwa terrorism literary memoir free-speech secularism Salman Rushdie
5776a37 "Writing, too, is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you wrote, it pours out of you. If you can capture that reality around you, your writing needs nothing else. You don't only listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck. Listening is receptivity. The deeper you can listen, the better you can write. You can take in the way things are without judgment, and the next day you can write the truth about the way things are." ...If you can capture the way things are that's all the poetry you ever need." writing natalie-goldberg memoir Natalie Goldberg
ba890e2 Mr. Schlubb, the pear-shaped PE teacher, sent us all out to run half a dozen laps around a preposterously enormous cinder track. For the Greenwood kids--all of us white, marshmallowy, innately unphysical, squinting unfamiliarly in the bright sunshine--it was a shock to the system of an unprecedented order. exercise humor gym running memoir Bill Bryson
d29e96b mates, to my sisters and me, are seen mainly as shadows of the people they're involved with. they move. They're visible in direct sunlight. But because they don't have access to our emotional buttons-- because they can't make us twelve again, or five, and screaming-- they don't really count as players. family-relationships humour human-frailties memoir David Sedaris
5aa796f Katherine Anne [Porter] treated them like favored nephews; she even cooked meals for them. Unfortunately, however, beneath Christopher's deference and flattery, there was a steadily growing aggression. By her implicit claim to be the equal of Katherine Mansfield and even Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne had stirred up Christopher's basic literary snobbery. , he began to mutter to himself, this vain old frump, this dressed-up cook in her arty finery, how dare she like this! And he imagined a grotesque scene in which he had to introduce her and somehow explain her to Virginia, Morgan [Forster] and the others . . . [t]hus Katherine Anne became the first of an oddly assorted collection of people who, for various reasons, made up their minds that they would never see Christopher again. The others: Charlie Chaplin, Benjamin Britten, Cole Porter, Lincoln Kirstein. gossip memoir Christopher Isherwood
2cff758 I saw it all suddenly while I was reading . . . Forster's the only one who understands what the modern novel ought to be . . . Our frightful mistake was that we believed in tragedy: the point is, tragedy's quite impossible nowadays . . . We ought to aim at being essentially comic writers . . . The whole of Forster's technique is based on the tea-table: instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones them down until they sound like mothers'-meeting gossip . . . In fact, there's actually less emphasis laid on the big scenes than on the unimportant ones: that's what's so utterly terrific. It's the completely new kind of accentuation--like a person talking a different language . . . . memoir Christopher Isherwood
b241291 "This sound, which like all music--indeed, like all pleasure--I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through its rooms, the festivals, the love and work, the honestly earned slumber, the voices and the nimble commotion, the perennial tribe of cats and dogs and birds, "laughter and ability and Sighing, And Frocks and Curls." All this I realized was more than I could ever abandon, even as what I had set out so deliberately to do was more than I could inflict on those memories, and upon those, so close to me, with whom the memories were bound. And just as powerfully I realized I could not commit this desecration on myself." depression memoir William Styron
b0275cf You're inside at the kitchen table wolfing cereal when she says, 'you have accomplished a great thing.' You say, 'and what would that be, bwana?' Meredith says, 'you're your same self.' The truth of this flickers past you, gnat-like. For years, you've felt only half done inside, cobbled together by paper clips, held intact by gum wads and school paste. But something solid is starting to assemble inside you. You say, 'I am my same self. That's not nothing, is it?' That catchphrase will serve as a touchstone for years to come, an instant you'll return to after traveling the far roads. Like everything else, Meredith thought it up. You were there solely for embellishment and witness: memoir Mary Karr
ad4d7a2 Reading wasn't an attempt to educate myself. It was my chief escape from a world that, although gorgeous in landscape and rich with mountain culture, didn't provide what I needed--the promise of adventure, a life beyond the perimeter of hills. I often fantasized that I'd been adopted and had mysterious powers such as flying or teleportation. Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish. Within the pages of a novel, I was unafraid: of my father, of dogs, snakes, and the bully across the creek; of older boys who drove hot rods close enough to make me jump in the ditch; of armed men parked near the bootlegger. science-fiction memoir Chris Offutt
77004d2 In writing you can always change the ending or delete a chapter that isn't working. Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable. grief memoir Ariel Levy
143ca73 That is what War is, I thought: two ships pass each other, and nobody waves his hand. travel-writing memoir Christopher Isherwood
b16a940 Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation. memoirs memoir Mary Karr
47b56f2 There was no better path to autonomy for an ambitious young businesswoman than to be married off to a respectable corpse. memoir Elizabeth Gilbert
a49a673 I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and cleanly delineated from our realities as possible, and that sometimes it can take years of effort to reach such a point of sober discernment. memoir Elizabeth Gilbert
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