20th-century Memoirist Quotes

Primo Levi

James Ellroy

Traudl Junge

Hiroo Onoda

Tobias Wolff

June Havoc

Erica Jong

All I want to do is make serious movies that explore social issues and turn a profit, and slip the schnitzel to Jane DePugh.

Marriage, in my culture, has nothing to do with romance. It's a matter of logic. If Mr. and Mrs. Ahmadi like Mr. and Mrs. Nejari, then their children should get married. On the other hand, if the parents don't like each other, but the children do, well, this is where sad poetry comes from.

These moments were wondrous and divine, instances when the gossamer curtain between heaven and earth ripped and all of humanity witnessed the marvel of the ethereal beings.

Danielle Trussoni

The past, for everyone, is full of missed chances, surviving to understand them, if not set them straight, is one of the things that makes the next breath worth taking.

The attempt to render visual intricacy makes words feel unwieldy, like sacks of meaning that must be lugged into place, dragged here and there, then still don't fell accurate.

Men should never give up. I never do. I would hate to lose.

Maybe my desire to find meaning in all of this was just a remnant of my obsessive-compulsive behavior, and yet it felt as though a map was being drawn for me, but every landmark was a riddle that needed solving before I could unearth my own lost treasure: myself.

On the importance of speaking French fluently rather than accurately:

It's nerve and brass, audace and disrespect, and leaping-before-you-look and what-the-hellism, that must be developed.

Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he'd led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity - its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.

Stories are letters. Letters sent to anybody or everybody. But the best kind are meant to be read by a specific somebody. When you read that kind you know you are eavesdropping.

John Edgar Wideman

Fatigue roughens up the edges of your nerves; it exposes your fears and your weaknesses.

While we have more than we need on this continent, and others die for want of it, there can be no lasting peace. When we work as hard in peacetime to make this world decent to live in, as in wartime we work to kill, the world will be decent, and the causes for which men fight will be gone.

Agnes Newton Keith

They say something about being safe in the bunker, and how it's almost fun to hear the explosions when they know the bangs can't hurt them. Suddenly there is the sound of a shot, so loud, so close that we all fall silent. It echoes on through all the rooms. "That was a direct hit," cried Helmut [Goebbels] with no idea how right he is. The Fuhrer is dead now.

The extension of power offered by a pony, the ease and speed of movement, the tapping of unsuspected courage, the satisfaction of collaboration with another creature and of controlling it in order to improve the collaboration, the joy of fussing over it - of loving it - these, from the age of about eight to sixteen were the most completely realised delights of my life.

Most fairly successful advertising men like to think that the composition of their copy involves enormous esthetic skills and they have a tendency to excuse the collecting of their exorbitant bribes on the ground that for the first time in history true genius is, at last, finding adequate compensation.

Alexander King (author)

Our current criminal justice system has no provision for restorative justice, in which an offender confronts the damage they have done and tries to make it right for the people they have harmed. Instead, our system of "corrections" is about arm's-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night.

I've learned that you have to be able to flow. Any way the wind blows is cool with me.

All rivers, even the most dazzling, those that catch the sun in their streams, all rivers go down to and are drowned in the sea. And life awaits man as the sea awaits the river.

Simone Schwarz-Bart

The usual trouble with volunteers is not killing them with overwork, but simply boring them to death.

Sometimes the briefest moments capture us, force us to take them in, and demand that we live the rest of our lives in reference to them.

Possibility, infinity, beauty — none of those words were right. [...] What he really wanted to say was: have you felt this? this phantom life streaking like a phosphorescent hound at the edges of your ruin?

All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.

If the present is really all we have, then the present lasts forever.

I am part of a vast generation of people who perpetually live as if they just graduated from college.

I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.