Memoir Quotes - Page 15

• The man is always the last to know when Cupid has struck him -Anonymous, Memoirs of a Mistress

  Sabrina Jeffries

  Men, Mistress, Lasts

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• Memoir is a weird genre for a reporter. You end up investigating your own memories, reporting out your past.

  William Finnegan

  Memories, Past, Ends

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.

  Sloane Crosley

  Thinking, Insane, Sound

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• My book 'Trust Your Heart', which is the story of my life, will be followed by 'Singing Lessons', a memoir of love, loss, hope, and healing, which talks about the death of my son and the hope that has been the aftermath of the healing from that tragedy.

  Judy Collins

  Life Lesson, Book, Healing

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• Brian Turner has given us not so much a memoir as a mediation, rendered with grace and wit and wisdom. If you want to know what modern soldiers see when they look at their world, read this book.

  Larry Heinemann

  Book, Grace, Soldier

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• No innocent man buys a gun, and no happy man writes his memoirs.

  Garrison Keillor

  Death, Suicide, Writing

  Garrison Keillor (1990). “Lake Wobegon Days”, p.70, Penguin

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• Whether I serve one or two terms in the Presidency, I will find myself at the end of that period at what might be called the awkward age-too old to begin a new career and too young to write my memoirs.

  John F. Kennedy

  Writing, Careers, Two

  John F. Kennedy, Dominique Enright (2003). “The Wicked Wit of John F. Kennedy”, Michael O'Mara Books

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• In my memoir, I wanted to introduce American women to Iranian women and our lives. I'm not from the highest echelons of society, nor the lowest. I'm a woman who is a lawyer, who is a professor at a university, who won the Nobel Peace Prize. At the same time, I cook. And even when I'm about to go to prison, one of the first things I do is to make enough food and put it in the fridge for my family.

  Shirin Ebadi

  Firsts, Lawyer, Prison

  "Iran Awakening - An Interview With Shirin Ebadi". Interview with Brian Shott, news.newamericamedia.org. May 20, 2006.

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• I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Historical, Nonfiction, Female

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• Admittedly, key archival documentation remains under lock and key and will be inaccessible for a long time to come. But enough material is available, in the form of declassified documents, memoirs, oral histories and journalistic treatments, to begin to piece together the story.

  Fredrik Logevall

  Keys, Long, Together

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• Writing a memoir isn't particularly interesting to me. I'm not like Ellen [DeGeneres], where I can write, 'Water bottles--they're crazy!' and it's funny.

  Lauren Graham

  Crazy, Writing, Water Bottles

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• In preparing the present volume, it has been the aim of the author to do full justice to the ample material at his command, and, where possible, to make the illustrations tell the main story to anatomists. The text of such a memoir may soon lose its interest, and belong to the past, but good figures are of permanent value. [Justifying elaborate illustrations in his monographs.]

  Othniel Charles Marsh

  Science, Past, Illustration

  Othniel Charles Marsh (1886). “Dinocerata: A Monograph of an Extinct Order of Gigantic Mammals”

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• Who ... is not familiar with Maxwell's memoirs on his dynamical theory of gases? ... from one side enter the equations of state; from the other side, the equations of motion in a central field. Ever higher soars the chaos of formulae. Suddenly we hear, as from kettle drums, the four beats 'put n=5.' The evil spirit v vanishes; and ... that which had seemed insuperable has been overcome as if by a stroke of magic ... One result after another follows in quick succession till at last ... we arrive at the conditions for thermal equilibrium together with expressions for the transport coefficients.

  Ludwig Boltzmann

  Science, Expression, Evil

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• The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.

  Salman Rushdie

  Differences, Trying, Stories

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• I'm not one of those people who's so blinded by my own work and my sweat. It's kind of risky writing a memoir when you're really part of a larger universe.

  Questlove

  Writing, Sweat, People

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• If you've traveled independently through Tibet, Brandon Wilson's Yak Butter Blues will bring back memories...this lively memoir is sure to provide a yak-scented whiff of nostalgia.

  Hannah Nordhaus

  Memories, Yaks, Nostalgia

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• Speaking specifically about the memoir, I know that's a criticism that people can have about my work. When I look at the young men's lives, if they're reduced to the worst thing they've done, then it's easy for them to become a stereotype. I keep running into that with newspaper articles that are very short.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Running, Men, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.

  Rick Moody

  Writing, Relief, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution.

  Marco Roth

  Book, Writing, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The real mistake of women was to let the memoir, the collective, the history, space of producing history - to let it in the hands of men.

  Fatema Mernissi

  Real, Mistake, Men

  "Remembering Islamic Feminist Fatema Mernissi". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. December 10, 2015.

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• Unless your aim is to deceive, there's not a meaningful distinction between memoir and fiction. They're marketing categories.

  Emily Gould

  Meaningful, Marketing, Fiction

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Eisenhower managed to begin the Vietnam war by not following his normal instinct of staying out of mischief. In his memoirs, he tells us why we didn't honor the Geneva accords and hold elections in Vietnam: because some 80 percent of the country would have voted for Ho Chi Minh. This is very candid. The sort of thing one might have found in Stalin'smemoirs, had he not made ghosts even of ghosts.

  Gore Vidal

  Country, War, Honor

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• Most memoirs about alcoholism, promiscuity, and addiction are deep, sobering tales full of scars that will never heal and include alarming statistics and reflection about recovery.This is not one of those memoirs.

  Kate Madison

  Recovery, Reflection, Addiction

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• When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, "Novels," and she said, "You should be writing them then." Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.

  Melissa Febos

  Smart, Writing, College

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I'm a memoir writer. I try to understand the world by taking experiences I have and making them into a story, whether it's a narrative memoir, blogging for The Huffington Post, writing poems, or talking on the screen about what has happened to me and how that relates to the world at large.

  Staceyann Chin

  Writing, Talking, Trying

  Source: www.ebony.com

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