Memoirist Famous Quotes & Sayings
33 Memoirist Famous Sayings, Quotes and Quotation.
You think you know the story so well. It's a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I've ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her. There are shattering earthquakes, tectonic-plate-type shifts. Or it's like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside.— Mary Karr
Affective life thus shows us that we are not only individuals, that our being is not reducible to our individuated being.— Muriel Combes
The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom-or rather the movement toward it-that counts.— Vivian Gornick
Only one reliable force stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. Only one reliable force forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. Only one reliable force restrains the hand of the man of power. And, in an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.— Peter Hitchens
The tumults of time are oft passed by in records of the private memoirist; for our days consist not of the Senatorial speech and the refracted solar beam cast through heroic cloud, but rather of bread eaten, and ink blotted, and talk of the sermon, and walks along the whiskery avenues in the garden.— M T Anderson
Forgiveness is not an emotion, it's a decision.— Randall Worley
A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.— Arthur Golden
People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are.— W. Somerset Maugham
Words become low by the occasions to which they are applied, or the general character of them who use them; and the disgust which they produce arises from the revival of those images with which they are commonly united.— Samuel Johnson
The recitation of grievances was strange balm.— Regina O'Melveny
And it struck me that maybe True magazine had been wrong. Maybe there are no New Men. Maybe there are only the living and the dead, and all those who are living deserve each other and are equal to each other.— Miranda July
How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the "I" that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.— Tracy Kidder
Whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:— Mary Karr
We simply do not value rest. Busyness is lauded, and idleness is of the Devil.— Andrew Gilmore
No latitude makes any difference to what men will do to other men, whether for gain or in the name of justice.— Barry Unsworth
The successful memoirist [blogger] respects facts, uses them accurately, rigorously represses the human impulse to lie or embellish, but knows that truth is both different from facts and greater than facts, and not always their sum.— Bill Roorbach
![Memoirist Sayings By Bill Roorbach: The successful memoirist [blogger] respects facts, uses them accurately, rigorously represses the human impulse to](https://www.greatsayings.net/images/memoirist-sayings-by-bill-roorbach-690391.jpg "Memoirist Sayings By Bill Roorbach: The successful memoirist [blogger] respects facts, uses them accurately, rigorously represses the human impulse to")
I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.— Mary Karr
Love, you're a goddess. You were never normal.— Lia Davis
To be a good biographer, you have to be an empiricist. You know, you have to gather the evidence, you have to keep an open mind, and you have to be objective. A memoirist goes in with all the baggage of a bad biographer.— Blake Bailey
Can't you just like a girl who likes you back?'— Rainbow Rowell
'None of them likes me back. I may as well like the one I really want.
My goodness, I'm like a hog at a trough!— Roxanne Snopek
The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it's physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker.— Mary Karr
The memoirist's job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.— Mary Karr
I don't know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it's always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia. As a memoirist, you have to crack your head open and examine every uncomfortable thing in there.— Koren Zailckas
I have made noise enough in the world already, perhaps too much, and am now getting old, and want retirement.— Napoleon Bonaparte
If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?— Darin Strauss
The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in a void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom - or rather the movement towards it - that counts.— Vivian Gornick
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
We ran like a herd of wild cattle.— William C. Oates
(Everywhere I go as a writer - especially if I'm in drag as a "memoirist" - such fears seem to be first and foremost on people's minds. People seem hungry, above all else, for permission, and a guarantee against bad consequences. The first, I try to give; the second is beyond my power.)— Maggie Nelson
When you're writing a book that is going to be a narrative with characters and events, you're walking very close to fiction, since you're using some of the methods of fiction writing. You're lying, but some of the details may well come from your general recollection rather than from the particular scene. In the end it comes down to the readers. If they believe you, you're OK. A memoirist is really like any other con man; if he's convincing, he's home. If he isn't, it doesn't really matter whether it happened, he hasn't succeeded in making it feel convincing.— Samuel Hynes
Of course, you'll have to meet the physical and psychological demands. A space walk takes a lot of energy.— Leroy Chiao
As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.— Mary Karr
