#memoir

Civilization is only possible for deeply unpleasant animals. It is only an ape that can be truly civilized. ↗

— Mark Rowlands

#animals #inspiring #memoir #pet #philosophy

A lot of presidential memoirs, they say, are dull and self-serving. I hope mine is interesting and self-serving. ↗

— William J. Clinton

#hope #i #interesting #lot #memoirs

I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy. ↗

— Darin Strauss

#family

You had a certain way of saying my name. It was the inflection maybe, something you put into those three syllables. And now you are gone and my name is just my name again, not the story of my life. ↗

— Abigail Thomas

#memoir #death

My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs. ↗

— Manuel Puig

#after #days #directing #fantasy #i

I haven't written my memoirs or let the television movie be made about my life. ↗

— Sally Ride

#haven #i #life #made #memoirs

Your heart is the size of your fist; keep loving, keep fighting. ↗

— Ariel Gore

#love

In those days, there was no money to buy books. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#memoir #reading #money

Any action a woman engages in from a spirit of joy, and within a similarly safe and joyous environment, falls within the city-walls of feminism. A girl has a right to dance how she wants, when her favourite record comes on. ↗

— Caitlin Moran

#memoir #environment

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