American Memoirist Quotes

James Ellroy

Elizabeth Ann Seton

Tobias Wolff

June Havoc

Erica Jong

Ann Patchett

Alice B. Toklas

Me, I have no paper in my palms to say where I belong. My son, this one who was born here in this land, has no papers in his palms to say where he belongs. Those who work in the cane mills, the owners keep their papers, so they have this as a rope around their necks. Papers are everything. You have no papers in your hands, they do with you what they want.

Edwidge Danticat

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.

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.

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

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)

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

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

I believe in the curative powers of love as the English believe in tea or Catholics believe in the Miracle of Lourdes.

The only language she could speak was grief. How could he not know that? Instead, she said, "I love you." She did. She loved him. But even that didn't feel like anything anymore.

If a person has never given writing a try, they assume that a brilliant idea is hard to come by. But really, even if it takes some digging, ideas are out there. Just open your eyes and look at the world. Writing the ideas down, it turns out, is the real trick.

The paradox: there can be no pilgrimage without a destination, but the destination is also not the real point of the endeavor. Not the destination, but the willingness to wander in pursuit characterizes pilgrimage. Willingness: to hear the tales along the way, to make the casual choices of travel, to acquiesce even to boredom. That's pilgrimage -- a mind full of journey.

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

I would rather have 1 amazing best friend than 100 decent regular friends. It's not about quantity, it's about quality.

The complicated thing about friends is that sometimes they are totally wrong about us and sometimes they are totally right and it's almost always only in retrospect that we know which is which.

If none of the mothers let their sons go, wouldn't that stop things, wouldn't it always have?

Mary Gordon (writer)

But the trek that starts with the feet always rises in time to the head. There had never been any of mankind's that didn't.

Hortense Calisher

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.

The necessity of loyalty between friends, the responsibility that the strong owe the infirm, the illusion of ill-gotten gain, the rewards of hard work, honesty, and trust-these are enduring truths glimpsed and judged first through the imagination, first through art.

Anybody who grows up in the South may have to reckon, some time or another, with being born again.

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

The sum of the parts equals less than the whole. Or the howl. Or the how. Or the hole.

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

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

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

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.