Quotes by Women Memoirists

George Sand

Traudl Junge

Elizabeth Ann Seton

June Havoc

Erica Jong

Ann Patchett

Diana Cooper

Of Madame Letizia Bonaparte:

She was very ignorant, not only of our literature, but of that of her own country.

Letizia Bonaparte was the mother of Napoleon Bonaparte

Laure Junot, Duchess of Abrantes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.