Memoir As Literature Quotes & Sayings

The intensity with which young people live demands that they "blank out" as often as possible. — Maya Angelou

The truth was, the more he got portrayed as an unprincipled, ruthless prick, the more clients flocked to him. Because when it came to divorce, people wanted a ruthless prick. They lined up for one. — Michael Crichton

On a spectrum of literary productions, memoir is just another form. If the person doing the reviewing or critiquing was ill-educated about literary forms, they could write something dunderheaded about the author or their life (I've seen these and barfed at them), but anyone who is well-practiced and educated in literature - why would they leave that at the door when entering memoir? — Lidia Yuknavitch

If you vote to leave the E.U ... we will have additional flexibility to help industries who really need it. — Michael Gove

We are concerned, not with the development of just one capacity, such as that of a mathematician, or a scientist, or a musician, but with the total development of the student as a human
being. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Writing evinces the soul of an active mind and every era produced persons whom devoted their being to exploring the mysteries of life, seeking to discern answers pertaining how to resolve the complexities and paradoxes of life. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The certainty that someone will never come back," the narrator muses of the dead, "never speak again, never take another step ... will never look at us or look away. I don't know how we bear it, or how we recover. — Javier Marias

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

Little in his brief life was lost on him; there are premonitions of Nineteen Eighty-Four even in his memoir of schooldays 'Such, Such Were the Joys'. Experiences in the colonies and the BBC can be seen to have furnished raw materials; so indeed can his reading of Evgeny Zamyatin's We and other dystopian literature from the early days of Stalinism. But the transcendent or crystallising moment undoubtedly occurred in Spain, or at any rate in Catalonia. This was where Orwell suffered the premonitory pangs of a man living under a police regime: a police regime ruling in the name of socialism and the people. For a Westerner, at least, this epiphany was a relatively novel thing; it brushed the sleeves of many thoughtful and humane people, who barely allowed it to interrupt their preoccupation with the 'main enemy', fascism. But on Orwell it made a permanent impression. — Christopher Hitchens

The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature." — Kate Zambreno

I was enthralled and moved by Azar Nafisi's account of how she defied,
and helped others to defy, radical Islam's war against women.
Her memoir contains important and properly complex reflections
about the ravages of theocracy, about thoughtfulness, and about the
ordeals of freedom-as well as a stirring account of the pleasures and
deepening of consciousness that result from an encounter with great
literature and with an inspired teacher. — Susan Sontag

One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: 'This is how you spend your days? Thinking about things like this?' I was ashamed. I could have been learning about string theory or how flowers pollinate themselves.
I think his remark was the beginning of my crisis of faith. Like so many of my generation in graduate school, I had turned to literature as a kind of substitute for formal religion, which no longer fed my soul, or for therapy, which I could not afford ... I became interested in exploring the theory of nonfiction and in writing memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection and social commentary. — Mary Rose O'Reilley

True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world — Patricia Hampl

I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature. — Leslie Fiedler

Nothing about these times makes any sense. Nothing. Putting it to words only makes it sound too simple. — Ralph Webster

I realised success as an actor alone wouldn't make me happy. I needed to explore my spiritual side in more depth. — Linus Roache

It's not a certain technique, it's not a skillit's all in your mind, it's how far you want to go — B.J. Penn

I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal. — Ralph Webster

You've got to have the right attire for the right event. I attend a lot of dinners, a lot of concerts, and I have to be on the red carpet; each has its own dress code, and I have to be prepared. Jeans and a hoodie are great for a concert, but a dinner party? — Amar'e Stoudemire

Dammit, Vik. How can you not know what's wrong with this thing? Can't you commune with it or something? (Devyn)
My name is not 'Dammit, Vik' and I find it ironic that you think I can commune with all metal beings when you can barely communicate your point of view to your own parents. And they birthed you. I did not give birth to this ship. Last time I checked, I was male and that would be impossible on a multitude of levels. (Vik) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

In life, we all have a cross to bear and a unique story to tell. We just hope that someone will take the time to listen. — Greg McVicker

I thought those were others. Soon, I was to learn that they were us. — Ralph Webster

I know of no trunk full of old heirlooms, no felt hats or army uniforms. There are no tarnished medals or gold watches. I've stopped dreaming of discovering the old shoe box filled with the history of our family, the documents and letters that recorded our family's arrival and the historical milestones as my grandfathers left their mark on a place. There is no journal or diary. I do not know if they knew how to read or write. I could easily dismiss their existence. Their lives seem empty and still, void of emotion. I cannot tell if they wear scars. I only know of my grandfathers as broken old men. — David Mas Masumoto

A word of warning here. The events as you remember them will never be the same in your memory once you have turned them into a memoir. For years I have worried that if I turn all of my life into literature, I won't have any real life left - just stories about it. And it is a realistic concern: it does happen like that. I am no longer sure I remember how it felt to be twenty and living in Spain after my parents died; my book about it stands now between me and my memories. When I try to think about that time, what comes to mind most readily is what I wrote. — Judith Barrington

How dangerous emperors are when they go mad. — Walid Jumblatt

We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin. — Mary Karr

Literature supplements the lives of people and enables us to feel connected with the world. Shared stories blunt a sense of tragic aloneness, and endow us with the tools to understand our humanness. Reading about the lives of other people acquaints us with the hardships of other people. The authorial voices of narrative prose express our shared feelings of deprivation — Kilroy J. Oldster

The more stories I study, the more I begin to suspect that there is only one story, and that we are, all of us, engaged in telling it. — J. Aleksandr Wootton

His righteousness rises above the sins of all men; His life is more powerful than all death; His salvation is more unconquerable than all hell. — Martin Luther

Human beings are religious animals. — Umberto Eco

In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament. — Vivian Gornick