Memoirist Quotes

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

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.

The first meal was an object lesson of much variety. My father produced several kinds of food, ready to eat, without any cooking, from little tin cans that had printing all over 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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

We must love stupid people better than ourselves; are they not the really unfortunate ones of this world? Do not people without taste and without ideal grow constantly weary, rejoicing in nothing, and being quite useless here below?

In 1917 I was only beginning to learn that life, for the majority of the population, is an unlovely struggle against unfair odds, culminating in a cheap funeral.

Siegfried Sassoon

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

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

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

Roger de Rabutin, Comte de Bussy

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.