Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Here, in memory, we live and die.
Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.
What is remembered is what becomes reality.
A careful first draft is a failed first draft
Refuse to write your life and you have no life.
Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.
poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
Memoirists wish to tell their mind, not their story.
We were never friends. Not for a second. I loved you.
Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts.
In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.
Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
Put on all the armor of the Lord. Not just the pretty stuff.
Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
Having their feelings make sense is how people get their kicks.
I take care of military families. Their sacrifices are very real.
None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick.
Most adults have forgotten what they had to do to survive childhood.
Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.
Knowing that you're crazy doesn't make the crazy things stop happening.
Well, I thought, last night I paid my dues. I faced death. Now I can stay.
I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.
Colds, ulcers, flu, and cancer are things we get. Schizophrenia is something we are.
Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.
Do you have to find the evil in yourself in order to truly recognize it in the world?
It's regrets that make painful memories. When I was crazy I did everything just right.
It's always a thrilling risk to say exactly what you mean, to express exactly what you see.
The three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic.
When you are deep in misery, you reach out to those who can help, people who can understand.
True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world
Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.
The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.
I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.
You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.
Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth; sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.
Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?
Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.
It is hard to sever the cords that tie us to our slavery and leave intact those that bind us to ourselves.
One day can make your life. One day can ruin your life. All life is, is four or five days that change everything.
Once you've been talked to by voices, it's not possible to go back to a world where talking voices is not possible.
People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.
I didn't like the '60s because it was too important what people who had nothing to do with the war thought about it.
Prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all that is.
The real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool.
From a timid shy girl I had become a woman of resolute character, who could no longer be frightened by the struggle with troubles.
We store in memory only images of value. The value may be lost over the passage of time, but that's the implacable judgment of feeling.
Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.
We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.