#memoir

In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves! ↗

— Marjane Satrapi

#memoir #young_adult #humor

Brighton Beach does not look, smell, or sound like Russia. It's a parody of Russia at best, something as different from the real thing as a picture of the Eiffel Tower. Yes, they sell Russian food on Brighton Beach, and Russian books and videos, and Russian clothes, and there are Russian restaurants and Russian nightclubs, and everybody speaks Russian, but the Russianness of the place is so concentrated that it feels ridiculously exaggerated. Everything Russian on Brighton Beach is too Russian, far more Russian than in real Russia. This is what happens all over Brooklyn. From the Scandinavians of Bay Ridge to the Chinese of Sunset Park, Brooklyn's immigrants go to ridiculous extremes to re-create their homelands only to end up with a vulgar pastiche. ↗

— Lara Vapnyar

#brooklyn-was-mine #essays #memoirs #food

But I wondered if all this kissing was a bad habit with him and me. The thing we did with our mouths instead of talking. ↗

— Gabrielle Zevin

#memoirs-of-a-teenage-amnesiac #love

once ruffle-skirted vanity table where I primped at thirteen, opening drawers to a private chaos of eyeshadows lavender teal sky-blue, swarms of hair pins pony tail fasteners, stashes of powders, colonies of tiny lipsticks (p.39) ↗

— Barbara Blatner

#colon-cancer #death #death-and-dying #death-and-sickness #death-at-home

I may not be able to make a horse drink, but it is my duty to lead it to water. ↗

— Conrad Taylor

#inspirational

If there is no fate and our interactions depend on such a complex system of chance encounters, what potentially important connections do we fail to make? What life changing relationships or passionate and lasting love affairs are lost to chance? ↗

— Simon Pegg

#fate #friendships #love #memoir #change

I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about -- the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of the box. There's no doubt it's the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth; it can put out fire; it can wear a piece of metal down and sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can't survive without being nurtured by water. And yet, you haven't drawn on those strengths in living your life, have you? ↗

— Arthur Golden

#change

Doubt is a lot like faith; A mustard's seed worth changes everything. ↗

— Donna Johnson

#humorous #literary-memoir #religion-meaning #change

Love was like notches on a speaker that could be cranked up and down, the decibels of desire, the frequencies of feeling. Sometimes she thought that she might have cranked it all the way up and broken the dial before the music had even started. ↗

— Alice Pung

#memoir #love

With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected. ↗

— William Least Heat-Moon

#travel #change