Memoirist Quotes

George Sand

Primo Levi

Siegfried Sassoon

George Moore

James Ellroy

Traudl Junge

Hiroo Onoda

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.

Is it ever really a waste of time to love someone, truly and deeply, with everything you have?

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

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 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 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.

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

Perhaps if we lived with less physical beauty we would develop our true natures more.

Shirley Hazzard

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.

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

I am fit for nothing but to carry candles and set chairs all my life.

There is nothing in the world which does not have its decisive moment, and the masterpiece of good management is to recognize and grasp this moment.

Jean François Paul de Gondi

There is a greater distance between love and indifference than between hatred and love.

Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy

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

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.

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

I can't prove to you that there is a God, I just know. All this suffering has to have a reason.

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

There is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities. For as those majestic, magisterial truck-horses of the docks, I would as soon think of striking a judge on the bench, as to lay violent hand upon their holy hides.

One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did, but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way: If we were capable of taking in the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.

Variant translation: A single Anne Frank arouses more emotion than the myriad others who suffered like her but whose images have remained in the shadows. Maybe things are this way out of necessity; if we had to and could suffer the suffering of everybody, we would be unable to live

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

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.

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.

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)

What I was really happy with was a lover who had a nice wife to do his washing and look after him if he fell ill, so that I could enjoy the plums of love without having to munch through the pudding.