Memoir Quotes & Sayings

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

A memoir, at its heart, is written in order to figure out who you are. — Sean Wilsey

If there is no fate and our interactions depend on such a complex system of chance encounters, what potentially important connections do we fail to make? What life changing relationships or passionate and lasting love affairs are lost to chance? — Simon Pegg

Candid and searing, Deborah Jiang Stein's memoir is a remarkable story about identity, lost and found, and about the author's journey to reclaim - and celebrate - that most primal of relationships, the one between mother and child. I dare you to read this book without crying. — Mira Bartok

Now I say I'm a diarist with an explanation I'll get back to you on. Someday I may try and write in memoir form. — Carrie Fisher

I was taught growing up not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers, to withdraw myself from the sinful 'others'. But we are all others. We are all sinners in someone's eyes. — Anna White

Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties
one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened. — Virginia Woolf

When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say 'all kinds,' but really I mean I don't write any kind at all: I'm trying to dissolve the borders between memoir and journalism and criticism by weaving them together. — Leslie Jamison

Sometimes a soldier returns home and all he can do is share his story in the hopes that somehow, in some way, it helps another soldier make sense of things. And although the stories may not be perfect, sometimes just sharing is enough to make a difference. — Michael Anthony

As well as writing, 2004 saw my first attempt at wine making: the elixir of life. Unfortunately, my effort tasted more like the elixir of death. — Craig Briggs

We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Attempting to express a person's objective reality and subjective state of mind with the written word is an endless task because writing alters our perception of reality and amends our mental equilibrium. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I think the act of lying can be separated from the genre of memoir. Though often times, people are unaware of their own subjectivity. — Rob Roberge

I sit on a foldaway chair at the lakeside, sipping hot cocoa and admiring the sunset behind distant clouds, pondering my next novel, which will be more truth than fiction. More memoir than tale. It will begin at the Third Garden and end here at Little Loch Broom, floating on a leaf over clear water, a bared soul visible to all those who would desire a glimpse of a childhood most extraordinary. — I.J. Sarfeh

I was his "little girl with the William Burroughs mind," his "secret fairy," "female Frank Zappa" and "window onto a magical world." He said I fell to earth, leaving wing-marks on the ceilings of our dreams. — Jalina Mhyana

Leopold, one of the reporters who broke the Enron story, is now breaking his own story: how he got addicted to cocaine, committed grand theft, cleaned himself up and found happiness as a 'news junkie.' This scrappy memoir ... might become required reading for aspiring journalists. — Publishers Weekly

As a blogger, Chez Pazienza is filled with outrage, passion and insight
delivered with a distinctive point of view, a wicked sense of humor, and a two-fisted style of prose. In Dead Star Twilight, he turns all these on himself
and produces a fierce, funny, disturbing, but ultimately uplifting memoir. This is the book A Million Little Pieces dreamed of being. — Arianna Huffington

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.' — Tim O'Brien

Is that the ultimate need? To secure some agent to act as a salve, a bandage, a cover-up, concealer over the black eye, as opposed to facing the issue head on. Nobody wants to address the fist. We'd all much rather take something for the pain and make it all go away. — Katandra Jackson Nunnally

Gypsy [Rose Lee ] was a masterful storyteller, and her memoir and by extension, the musical weren't only Gypsy's monument; they were also her chance for monumental revisionism. — Karen Abbott

In fact, because I liked him so badly, I needed to continue on my course. I was finally becoming the woman I wanted to be, and she was whom I needed to show Dash - and myself. — Aspen Matis

Sometimes the best way we can serve God is by honouring and taking care of that which has already been give to us. This, is my case, is my children. — Cheryl B. Evans

Just because I am paranoid does not mean that someone is not out to get me — Don Darkes

My mother taught me that an important word in any language is while. while one thing is happening so is another. While someone is in darkness another is in daylight.While person dies another is born. — Margaret Leis HannaBrunhilde Maurer Barron Barron

No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself. — Arthur Golden

I feel that I'm an essayist and that my best work gets done in that form. I wanted to do a book where the essays could exist on their own terms. A book that was neither a book of essays that were shoehorned into a memoir, nor [one where] the essays had been published elsewhere first, [because] then they would kind of bear the marks of those publications. — Meghan Daum

I sell my first book to Random House, a memoir of my years as a war photographer, for twice my NBC salary. — Deborah Copaken Kogan

She has learned to love. To fear. To hate. And then to love again. Through it all, she writes." ~Once Upon A Time There Was A Girl — Kimberly Kinrade

Carl constantly told horror stories of cursing and beatings from his father and the twenty-four-hour blackout screaming of his alcoholic, pill-popping mother. He used his trauma like a caution sign for what he could do if I didn't silence my backtalk. — Maggie Young

Some of my favorite contemporary Montana writers and their books include Annick Smith's Homestead, a memoir of her experiences, along with her husband and four children, homesteading in the Blackfoot Valley on 163 acres in the 1960s; Deirdre — Nancy Pearl

If you don't like it, Eat me. — Rae Murphy

The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely. — David Sedaris

You wrote in a poem, "I love your body," as if love was for you embodied in the senses, and yet more than the senses together, an enveloping sense itself sensuous, as if all the body made sense. — David Plante

Fact: upon locking yourself our of your apartment you will immediately need to use the bathroom. Fact: and then you will stand in place and watch your door. You will just stare. As though rebuffed by it. As though it has done this to you. — Augusten Burroughs

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. — Andy Behrman

After a lifetime of soft, easy living in the West, one's buttocks take an awful hammering out here. Backpacking around India is just one long round of sitting on bone-hard, chafing, bruising and generally uncomfortable seats-whether in buses our trains, or restaurants or cinemas. There is no such thing as a padded seat in the whole country. — Frank Kusy

Any action a woman engages in from a spirit of joy, and within a similarly safe and joyous environment, falls within the city-walls of feminism. A girl has a right to dance how she wants, when her favourite record comes on. — Caitlin Moran

When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes. — Dave Eggers

Fpr ome aftermppm a week leading up to the formal, the entire senior school body would pile into our massive gymnasium and learn dances that we would NEVER DANCE AGAIN, except at our own children's formals, perhaps. Nevertheless, we threw ourselves into the task as if we were living in a Jane Austen novel and this was the only way we would ever fit into society. (from How to Be Happy: A Memoir of Love, Sex and Teenage Confusion) — David Burton

To put it squarely, as I say in my memoir, the eternal triangle has come full circle. — Muriel Spark

I've written for those who want to learn, truly learn, about a community with which they aren't familiar. Or for those who have preconceptions but can admit they may not be entirely accurate (and, in some cases, that they are completely wrong). This means my reader must possess an open mind and a certain level of curiosity. If that's you, proceed to checkout. An uncensored glimpse behind the curtain, hairy backs and all, awaits. — Daniel Stern

The Americans were understandably on hair triggers. There was a good reason for all of this security. For despite TV images of quick victory, much of Baghdad certainly had not fallen and firefights with die-hard Ba'athists loyal to Saddam Hussein were raging all over the city. — Lawrence Anthony

The world is full of broken people who think they are surrounded by whole people. — Greg Garrett

Motherhood is exactly the kind of "special circumstance" that lends itself to memoir. It is a time of transition and sometimes a period of intense identity struggle: Who am I if I spend all day shirtless, trying to nurse a colicky baby? What happened to my former life, my former self? How do I balance my own needs with those of my family? I am drawn to all kinds of motherhood memoirs because I am interested in the different ways that women process the challenges and joys of motherhood, and how they write about life in general through their mother eyes. — Kate Hopper

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. — Elizabeth Gilbert

In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years. — Steve Martin

Your past doesn't dictate what your future will be. — Jillian Bullock

I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority). — Gore Vidal

Having felt the piercing gash of grief and lived through it, having loved to the brink of brokenness, and having learned the difference between friendship and frivolity, one eventually takes a conscious step through the invisible membrane that separates hubris from humility ... — Eldonna Edwards

His laugh is made of porch swings and lemonade. — Augusten Burroughs

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

I don't think anybody would be interested in my memoir - and my memory isn't very good either! — Peter Serafinowicz

At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the splashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. There is nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked. Here everything has its history, and mine; here is space for the spaceless kingdom of the world's and the psyche's hinterland. — C. G. Jung

She hops expectantly into the sink. I turn on the tap for her; she laps without a glance in my direction, like a duchess so used to being ministered to that she no longer notices the servants and sees only a world where objects dumbly bend to her wishes, doors opening, faucets discharging cool water, delicious things appearing in her dish. — Peter Trachtenberg

The selection process is simple. Hubby exhausts every ploy in his psychological arsenal to filter out the liars, fakes, and undesirables. (If only every husband were so devoted . . .) Me, I try to prove to that I'm not the stereotypical single male. That I'm in the Lifestyle for the right reasons. That I'm courteous and respectful. All of which are true, but the burden of proof is on
me. It always is. — Daniel Stern

Finally the dawn came, the sky fringed with pink, and the sun bright as a coin in a spill of rising red. — Lauren Slater

I couldn't see killing myself if I had a book that was only half-read: Fountainhead, Catcher in the Rye, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, One Hundred Years of Solitude? No. I figured that those who killed themselves first had to finish whatever book they were reading...if it were any good, that is. Of course, there's always the occasional book that makes you want to throw yourself off a bridge just for having wasted your time reading it. But I usually finished those ones, too. — Michael Anthony

If you always dreamed of writing a novel or a memoir, and you used to love to write, and were pretty good at it, will it break your heart if it turns out you never got around to it? If you wake up one day at eighty, will you feel nonchalant that something always took precedence over a daily commitment to discovering your creative spirit? If not
if this very thought fills you with regret
then what are you waiting for? — Anne Lamott

You can make a difference in another person's life and not realize it, just by giving them One Moment of your time, One Memory to recall, One Motion that tells them they are not alone! OM! — Deb Simpson

But you have to remember...that you can't run from unhappiness. You just take it with you. — Karen Wheeler

Where would the memoir be without bipolar writers? I mean, that's what - that whole oversharing thing is really a very clear symptom of bipolar disorder. And I'm not saying that every, you know, I'm not accusing every memoirist of being bipolar. But I think in a way it's kind of a gift. — Ayelet Waldman

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

The Stovepipe is a memoir full of laughter and tears and a moving story of sisterly love as well as their will to survive. — Dave Pelzer

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness. — Sue Monk Kidd

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

Madame Bellwings, Memoir Elf Coordinator, was not at all pleased with this request, because elves who write the memoirs of teenage girls have the habit of returning to the magical realm with atrocious grammar. They can't seem to shake the phrases "watever" and "no way," and they insert the word like into so many sentences that the other elves start slapping them ... and for no apparent reason occasionally call out the name Edward Cullen. — Janette Rallison

Well, I'd like to think I am, and I'd also like to think that we're all having a lot more fun getting older than we pretend. It was interesting to me when I first started working on this book that I'd mentioned that I was writing a memoir about aging and everybody would moan and groan and carry on. — Anna Quindlen

ANTHONY DOERR is the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won numerous prizes both in the United States and overseas, including four O. Henry Prizes, three Pushcart Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Raised in Cleveland, Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons. — Anthony Doerr

Whatever you believe, and however, each of us deals with these events in our lives, one thing is for certain the truism, time is a great healer, is of no consolation at that moment of intense, all-consuming grief.

From GLASS HALF FULL — Sarah Jane Butfield

Our destiny is aligned with our heart's innermost longing, a longing embedded within our soul before birth. This longing is a unique pattern or configuration reminiscent of the constellations in the night sky. When we express (press out) our unique configuration, it shines through us with an otherworldly luminosity, manifesting abundance in our lives and the lives of others. Our sole task is to yoke our inner destiny, thread it through our lives and weave it into the world. All else is just shadows and dust. — Thea Euryphaessa

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. — Vladimir Nabokov

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

We soon got the idea that 'Italian' meant something inferior, and a barrier was erected between children of Italian origin and their parents. This was the accepted process of Americanization," Covello reflected in his memoir The Heart Is the Teacher. "We were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of our parents. — Maria Laurino

She told me that women who wore makeup had bad values. Putting on makeup would have been a statement - a rebellion. I didn't try it. I grew to feel guilty for wanting to feel attractive. — Aspen Matis

A lifelong movie I already knew the ending to — Jason Najum

I threw away over 1,200 finished pages of my last memoir and broke the delete key on my keyboard changing my mind. If I had any balls at all, I'd make a brooch out of it. — Mary Karr

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as "petite and unopinionated". My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes "short and bossy. — Julian Barnes

I could have written a misery memoir and instead I tried to make it funny. I never complained. — Caitlin Moran

Defining oneself is a revolutionary act, and, as described in her memoir, Janet Mock fiercely fought to free herself with exquisite bravery and sensitivity. Redefining Realness is full of hope, dreams, and determination. It is a true American girl story. — Michaela Angela Davis

At a book festival in Fort Lauderdale, I met David Eisenhower, Ike's grandson, who was promoting his book 'Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower,' in which he describes attending the Yankees' 154th game in 1961. The whole family had been following Mantle and Maris chase Babe Ruth's home run record across the country. — Jane Leavy

Never in our silent moments of illusion do we sense the dark parallel that lives next to us. Nor do we suspect the carrier. — Kris Courtney

And some people have less star appeal than others, but sometimes they shine far brighter than those with more. — Mickey Leigh

Then one night we used the baby's head as a bong. (I'm pretty sure that's the only time that sentence has ever been used in a memoir. One would hope. I'd check it out on the Internet, but to be honest; that whole horse-enema-fetish stuff scared the shit out of me, so I'm not even going to look.) — Jenny Lawson

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. How dare she, he began to mutter to himself, this vain old frump, this dressed-up cook in her arty finery, how dare she presume 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. — Christopher Isherwood

You cannot go poking skeletons in the closet without making maggots wriggle." - Springfield Road — Salena Godden

What's glamorous is being a good father, a good husband, a good fucking dog owner. That's what I care about today. That's what matters. I will devote everything to that. And I will succeed. Because I cannot fall down again. I will not fall down again. I mean, I don't have to fall. None of us have to fall. We don't all fall down. We don't. So I'm over this drug shit. It's done. And this is my last recovery memoir ever. — Nic Sheff

Had Volcker never pushed through his radical change in policy, the world would be many bond traders and one memoir the poorer. — Michael Lewis

A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform the event, deliver wisdom. — David Shields

Examination of our past is never time-wasting. Reverberations from the past provide learning rubrics for living today. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Heartbreaking and brave, Rachel Resnick masterfully pulls the past to the present, exploring how the seeds of addiction planted during an unhappy girlhood can blossom into a grown-up woman's frantic search for love. LOVE JUNKIE is a memoir unlike any other; it will blow your mind. — Lee Montgomery

The last time I'd spoken French I was twelve years old; before I reached my thirteenth birthday the teacher had correctly steered me into woodwork classes. — Craig Briggs

That's the thing about parents, I'm beginning to realize. You don't have to see them all that much to imitate them. — Leigh Newman

Mistakes? That's why they put erasers on pencils. — Rick Barnett

My father's haunting memories of war had been transformed into my own haunting memories. Such is the power of war and memory. — Roger Klare

The past is a presence between us. In all my mother does and says, the past continually discloses itself in the smallest ways. She sees it directly; I see its shadow. Still, it pulses in my fingertips, feeds on my consciousness. It is a backdrop for each act, each drama of our lives. I have absorbed a sense of what she has suffered, what she has lost, even what her mother endured and handed down. It is my emotional gene map. — Fern Schumer Chapman

All works of nonfiction, or memoir, have to first and foremost be art before they can be true. They have to be artful first before they can be truthful... If you emphasize the truth-telling at the expense of art, nobody is going to be interested in it. And if you sacrifice truth in the name of art, you risk triviality. There's a constant balance between those two. — Alan Shapiro

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

The morning opens, a mist of innocence appears across the countryside that tells each one of us the day is new. That feeling of hope, love and the humble awareness of our duty becomes clear if even for a moment. It is that experience of inspiration that follows us into a small town woken by a cool frost on this Sunday morning and the laughter of children playing. — Kris Courtney

Mary [Tyler Moore] was absolutely brilliant ... She is a fabulous actress. She can do anything. — Gavin MacLeod

God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity. — Francis Spufford