American Memoirist Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

Mary Gordon (writer)

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

I will go peaceably and firmly to the Catholic Church: for if Faith is so important to our salvation, I will seek it where true Faith first began, seek it among those who received it from God Himself.

Elizabeth Ann Seton

Sex is perhaps like culture — a luxury that only becomes an art after generations of leisurely acquaintance. Why we scarcely approach either as individuals — it's mass propulsion still!

Alice B. Toklas

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.