Memoir Quotes - Page 18

• My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Daughter, Grandmother, Generations

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• From the essay "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again" 1. Journalists sometimes make things up. 2. Journalists sometimes get things wrong. 3. Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, This might work better as a memoir. 6. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one.

  Nora Ephron

  Book, Men, Editors

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• There is a physics to the world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.

  Nick Flynn

  Self, Ego, Fiction

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• I have been presented with roles with demand not just a physical ability but mental disciplines as well. 'Memoirs of a Geisha' was not so much about physical exertion...it was much more graceful and contained than that.

  Michelle Yeoh

  Discipline, Roles, Demand

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Memories, Writing, Men

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• The reader of these Memoirs will discover that I never had any fixed aim before my eyes, and that my system, if it can be called a system, has been to glide away unconcernedly on the stream of life, trusting to the wind wherever it led.

  Giacomo Casanova

  Eye, Wind, Fixed

  Giacomo Casanova (2013). “The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt Volume 1: The Venetian Years”, p.24, Simon and Schuster

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• Historic figures have homes to visit for posterity; the Lord of history left no home. Luminaries leave libraries and write their memoirs; He left one book, penned by ordinary people. Deliverers speak of winning through might and conquest; He spoke of a place in the heart.

  Ravi Zacharias

  Bible, God, Religious

  FaceBook post by Ravi Zacharias from Oct 02, 2016

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• Death, death. Now I won't be able to write my beautiful memoirs.

  Joachim von Ribbentrop

  Beautiful, Writing, Able

  "Nuremberg Diary". Book by G. M. Gilbert, 1995.

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• What a lurid life Oscar Wilde does lead - so full of extraordinary incidents. What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century

  Max Beerbohm

  Oscars, Next, Doe

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• Auto da Fay reveals the trickles of a creative sensibility that later became a tide, but essentially, Weldon the writer emerges only at the very end of this volume, in conjunction with her finding and marrying her husband of 30 years, Ron Weldon. In this sense, it is half a memoir, the private background story to the public future. (...) The reader is forced to re-evaluate the spectacular weirdness of Weldon's fiction: having lived such a life any other kind would seem insipid.

  Joanna Murray-Smith

  Husband, Years, Creative

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• People say it's not what happens in your life that matters, it's what you think happened. But this qualification, obviously, did not go far enough. It was quite possible that the central event of your life could be something that didn't happen, or something you thought didn't happen. Otherwise there'd be no need for fiction, there'd only be memoirs and histories.

  Geoff Dyer

  Thinking, People, Events

  Geoff Dyer (2009). “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: A Novel”, p.56, Vintage

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• I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.

  Erik Larson

  Reading, Diaries, Bigs

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• A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like 'arraigned,' 'curried' and 'exculpate' meant, and explaining who Job was.   In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today's expensively under-educated generation.

  Thomas Sowell

  Jobs, School, Men

  Thomas Sowell (2006). “Ever Wonder Why? and Other Controversial Essays”, Hoover Inst Press

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• Language can still be an adventure if we remember that words can make a kind of melody. In novels, news stories, memoirs and even to-the-point memos, music is as important as meaning. In fact, music can drive home the meaning of words.

  Constance Hale

  Home, Adventure, News Stories

  "Writing for the ear" by Lisa Dusenbery, therumpus.net. June 13, 2012.

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• I had many reasons for writing memoir but among them was the hope that every Latino child and adult would find something familiar in it.

  Sonia Sotomayor

  Children, Writing, Adults

  Source: eldiariony.com

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• Novels–and memoirs–are perhaps the most comprehensive reports humans can deliver, of their private experiences, to other humans. In these terms there is only one kind of novel: a human attempt to transfer or convey some part or version of their world of noumenon to another’s world of noumenon.

  Tao Lin

  World, Kind, Term

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• I was too busy doing my job and living my life to spend time keeping notes for some future volume of memoirs.

  Pierre Trudeau

  Jobs, Time Keeping, Busy

  Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1995). “Memoirs”, McClelland & Stewart Limited

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• I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.

  Mitch Albom

  Writing, Grades, Incapable

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• THE LONG WALK is a raw, wrenching, blood-soaked chronicle of the human cost of war. Brian Castner, the leader of a military bomb disposal team, recounts his deployment to Iraq with unflinching candor, and in the process exposes crucial truths not only about this particular conflict, but also about war throughout history. Castner's memoir brings to mind Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front.

  Jon Krakauer

  Military, War, Team

  FaceBook post by Jon Krakauer from Jul 09, 2012

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• I often wonder if you wrote your memoir today, if your life story would be lived on the edge of possibility, if you held wonder in one hand and courage in the other and truly believed that anything was possible.

  Jean Houston

  Hands, Would Be, Stories

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• Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Un-put-down-able in the day and a half I spent reading it, Little Failure is a window into immigrant agony and ambition, Jewish angst, and anybody's desperate need for a tribe. Readers who've fallen for Shteyngart's antics on the page will relish the trademark humor. But here it's laden and leavened with a deep, consequential, psychological journey. Brave and unflinching, Little Failure is his best book to date

  Mary Karr

  Laughter, Book, Reading

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• To read Helen Macdonald's memoir, H Is for Hawk, is to feel as though Emily Bronte just turned up at your door, trailing all the windy, feral outdoors into your living room.

  Maureen Corrigan

  Doors, Hawks, Rooms

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• It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely assimilated when it is in the nascent state.

  James Clerk Maxwell

  Science, Students, Physics

  James Clerk Maxwell (1954). “A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism”, p.11, Courier Corporation

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