#memoirs

When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios. ↗

— Margery Allingham

#truth #life

Conformity is deformity ↗

— Sharon Desruisseaux

#cleopatra #egypt #historical #historical-fiction #isis

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

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy. ↗

— Arthur Golden

#beauty #melancholy #memoirs-of-a-geisha #beauty

Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that isn't it ↗

— Arthur Golden

#geisha #memoirs #change

It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while. ↗

— Arthur Golden

#memoirs #life

I was just thinking... isn't it lucky that we decided to become co-editors? If one takes a blow to the head, the other can fill in. If the other's lung spontaneoulsy collapses, the one can fill in. It's a perfect system once you think about it." ~Will Landsman ↗

— Gabrielle Zevin

#comedy #head #memoirs-of-a-teenage-amnesiac #spontaneous #comedy

Oh I'm sure you're right," Auntie said. "Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears. ↗

— Arthur Golden

#fiction #geisha #japan #memoirs #japan

I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message,' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form. ↗

— Isabel Allende

#aware #better #conveyed #even #fiction

I had read too many memoirs that were written after the writer or the director was past his or her prime. ↗

— Joe Eszterhas

#director #had #her #his #i