#memoir

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. ↗

— Dorothy Gallagher

#business

Lieux de memoire . . . 'exist because there are no longer any milieux de memoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.' And what are lieux de memoire? [They] are . . . vestiges . . . the rituals of a ritual-less society. ↗

— Tony Judt

#memory #milieux-de-memoire #rituals #vestiges #experience

They that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. ↗

— Patricia Christian Punches

#encouraging #faith #hope #inspirational #memoir

As Samson demonstrated, going bald ruins lives. ↗

— Brendan Jack

#empire #humor #humour #memoir #quote

All family stories are important, just as all people are important, and they deserve to be passed along. ↗

— Karen Chamberlain

#memoir #naval-aviation #naval-history #war #family

Aldrich bears witness to the tail-end of the disintegration of that most storied of American dynasties, the Astors. Growing up at Rokeby, the crumbling, 43-room family mansion on the Hudson River, she had ample opportunity to observe and participate in the eccentricities of her once mighty clan. Interweaving recollections from her dysfunctional childhood and tales of glories past, she accurately captures and communicates the madness and malaise that have infected many members of the last few generations of Astors. ↗

— Margaret Flanagan

#memoir #communication

For a moment, or a second, the pinched expressions of the cynical, world-weary, throat-cutting, miserable bastards we've all had to become disappears, when we're confronted with something as simple as a plate of food. ↗

— Anthony Bourdain

#food #humor #memoirs #food

As the lights fade to a distant glow, I look back toward the city and imagine, somewhere in all of those lives, a little girl who is a lot like me. Maybe she rides in a car thinking about someone living far away from these lights and people. Even though our lives are separated by so much I wonder if she imagines the world through eyes like mine. ↗

— Noriko Nakada

#imagination

Somehow the idyllic existence I envisioned never quite came to pass, but aside from the occasional culinary disaster, my marriage wasn't bad. ↗

— Alexandra Bogdanovic

#memoir #truth #marriage

I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#contrarianism #dissent #dissidents #free-thought #harold-rosenberg