#memoirs

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#imagination #lack #make #memoirs #people

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

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

We learn to appreciate what we achieve, no matter how small the achievement, because we do it ourselves. - Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live ↗

— Rachele Baker

#cancer #courage #diary #hope #inspirational

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

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

Memoirs are the backstairs of history. ↗

— George Meredith

#memoirs

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