β
Books are a uniquely portable magic.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.
β
β
Stephanie Klein (Straight Up and Dirty)
β
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
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β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
you can, you should, and if youβre brave enough to start, you will.
β
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Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
β
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Benjamin Franklin (Memoirs of the life & writings of Benjamin Franklin)
β
The farther you go...the harder it is to return. The world has many edges and it's easy to fall off.
β
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Anderson Cooper (Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival)
β
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
β
β
Arthur Conan Doyle (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes, #4))
β
You might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.
β
β
Lucille Clifton (Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (American Poets Continuum))
β
At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.
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Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
Description begins in the writerβs imagination, but should finish in the readerβs.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
Some nights the sky wept stars that quickly floated and disappeared into the darkness before our wishes could meet them.
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β
Ishmael Beah (A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier)
β
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
If you can't go back to your mother's womb, you'd better learn to be a good fighter.
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Anchee Min (Red Azalea: A Memoir)
β
It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathingβthey are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.
β
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Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot (Memoir, #1))
β
This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
Time doesn't take away from friendship, nor does separation.
β
β
Tennessee Williams (Memoirs)
β
Someday, weβll run into each other again, I know it.
Maybe Iβll be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens,
thatβs when Iβll deserve you. But now, at this moment, you canβt hook
your boat to mine, because Iβm liable to sink us both.
β
β
Gabrielle Zevin (Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac)
β
Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.
β
β
Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books)
β
Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul...
β
β
Marguerite Yourcenar (Memoirs of Hadrian)
β
If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?
β
β
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
β
Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribblerβs heart, kill your darlings.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don't kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, "He fought so hard." And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.
β
β
Sally Brampton (Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression)
β
It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldnβt live without him. Apparently I could.
β
β
Gabrielle Zevin (Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac)
β
What is it you most dislike? Stupidity, especially in its nastiest forms of racism and superstition.
β
β
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
β
I dont think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
What do you most value in your friends?
Their continued existence.
β
β
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
β
I don't know when we'll see each other again or what the world will be like when we do. We may both have seen many horrible things. But I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
In life you'll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it's because they're stupid. That will help keep you from reacting to their cruelty. Because there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance... Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself.
β
β
Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Persepolis, #1))
β
We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.
β
β
Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)
β
Just remember that Dumbo didn't need the feather; the magic was in him.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
Doubt β¦ is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.
β
β
Gustave Flaubert (Memoirs of a Madman)
β
Grief is a most peculiar thing; weβre so helpless in the face of it. Itβs like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
God is the Cure, Love is the Answer
β
β
Aimee Cabo Nikolov (God is the Cure, Love is the Answer : A Memoir)
β
I was crying a little for the boy I had wanted him to be and the boy he hadnβt turned out to be.
β
β
Gabrielle Zevin (Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac)
β
If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
No furniture is so charming as books.
β
β
Sydney Smith (A Memoir of the Rev. Sydney Smith; 2 volume set)
β
There is, in fact, an incredible freedom in having nothing left to lose.
β
β
Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)
β
I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're "not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won't.
β
β
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
β
Such silence has an actual sound, the sound of disappearance.
β
β
Suzanne Finnamore (Split: A Memoir of Divorce)
β
You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.
β
β
Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)
β
So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.
β
β
Margaret George (The Memoirs of Cleopatra)
β
To write is human, to edit is divine.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even a stone can be worn down with enough rain.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
Because you are defined not by life's imperfect moments, but by your reaction to them. And because there is joy in embracing - rather than running from - the utter absurdity of life.
β
β
Jenny Lawson (Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir)
β
Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me.
β
β
Isabel Allende (The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir)
β
Yesterday was surreal. At times K was almost back to herselfβ¦funnyβ¦interested and relatively mobile. She was tactile and we kissedβ¦she whispered naughty comments into my earβ¦achingly beautifulβ¦I love her so much
β
β
Peter B. Forster (More Than Love, A Husband's Tale)
β
Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.
β
β
Gail Caldwell (Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship)
β
You don't reason with intellectuals. You shoot them.
β
β
NapolΓ©on Bonaparte (Napoleon's Memoirs)
β
I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me.
β
β
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
β
Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?'
'To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.'
'The dog did nothing in the night-time.'
'That was the curious incident,' remarked Sherlock Holmes.
β
β
Arthur Conan Doyle (Silver Blaze (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, #1))
β
Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don't have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
In the sky there are always answers and explanations for everything: every pain, every suffering, joy and confusion.
β
β
Ishmael Beah (A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier)
β
I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our societyβ¦unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool.
β
β
Tina Fey
β
There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
β
β
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
β
Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
β
β
Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books)
β
I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In short, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.
β
β
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
β
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
β
β
Frederick Buechner (Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation)
β
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
So okayβ there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting, " he explained. "I seek to defeat his confidence. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory. Two men are equals - true equals - only when they both have equal confidence.
β
β
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
β
No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable
β
β
Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)
β
You forget all of it anyway. . . You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. . . You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. Theyβre the last to go. And then once youβve forgotten enough, you love someone else.
β
β
Gabrielle Zevin (Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac)
β
Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.
β
β
Stephen Fry (Moab Is My Washpot (Memoir, #1))
β
I have spent a good many years sinceβtoo many, I thinkβbeing ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.
β
β
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
β
When a woman is assaulted, one of the first questions people ask is, Did you say no? This question assumes that the answer was always yes, and that it is her job to revoke the agreement. To defuse the bomb she was given. But why are they allowed to touch us until we physically fight them off? Why is the door open until we have to slam it shut?
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β
Chanel Miller (Know My Name: A Memoir)
β
No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give of themselves to another as a dog gives of itself. I also suspect that we cherish dogs because their unblemished souls make us wish - consciously or unconsciously - that we were as innocent as they are, and make us yearn for a place where innocence is universal and where the meanness, the betrayals, and the cruelties of this world are unknown.
β
β
Dean Koontz (A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog)
β
There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn't one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be enough. There is no other way.
β
β
Marya Hornbacher (Wasted : A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)
β
Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.
β
β
Hugo Hamilton (The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood)
β
When youβre looking for love and it seems like you might not ever find it, remember you probably have access to an abundance of it already, just not the romantic kind. This kind of love might not kiss you in the rain or propose marriage. But it will listen to you, inspire and restore you. It will hold you when you cry, celebrate when youβre happy, and sing All Saints with you when youβre drunk. You have so much to gain and learn from this kind of love. You can carry it with you forever. Keep it as close to you as you can.
β
β
Dolly Alderton (Everything I Know About Love: A Memoir)
β
A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self β a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama β a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience.
β
β
William Styron (Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness)
β
I survived because I remained soft, because I listened, because I wrote. Because I huddled close to my truth, protected it like a tiny flame in a terrible storm. Hold up your head when the tears come, when you are mocked, insulted, questioned, threatened, when they tell you you are nothing, when your body is reduced to openings. The journey will be longer than you imagined, trauma will find you again and again. Do not become the ones who hurt you. Stay tender with your power. Never fight to injure, fight to uplift. Fight because you know that in this life, you deserve safety, joy, and freedom. Fight because it is your life. Not anyone elseβs. I did it, I am here. Looking back, all the ones who doubted or hurt or nearly conquered me faded away, and I am the only one standing. So now, the time has come. I dust myself off, and go on.
β
β
Chanel Miller (Know My Name: A Memoir)
β
I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain canβt quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death.
β
β
Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)
β
I do not remember very many things from the inside out. I do not remember what it felt like to touch things, or how bathwater traveled over my skin. I did not like to be touched, but it was a strange dislike. I did not like to be touched because I craved it too much. I wanted to be held very tight so I would not break. Even now, when people lean down to touch me, or hug me, or put a hand on my shoulder, I hold my breath. I turn my face. I want to cry.
β
β
Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)
β
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase 'terrible beauty.' Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.
β
β
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
β
You forget all of it anyway. First, you forget everything you learned-the dates of the Hay-Herran Treaty and Pythagorean Theorem. You especially forget everything you didn't really learn, but just memorized the night before. You forget the names of all but one or two of your teachers, and eventually you'll forget those, too. You forget your junior class schedule and where you used to sit and your best friend's home phone number and the lyrics to that song you must have played a million times. For me, it was something by Simon & Garfunkel. Who knows what it will be for you? And eventually, but slowly, oh so slowly, you forget your humiliations-even the ones that seemed indelible just fade away. You forget who was cool and who was not, who was pretty, smart, athletic, and not. Who went to a good college. Who threw the best parties Who could get you pot. You forget all of them. Even the ones you said you loved, and even the ones you actually did. They're the last to go. And then once you've forgotten enough, you love someone else.
β
β
Gabrielle Zevin (Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac)
β
I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
β
β
Isaac Asimov (I. Asimov: A Memoir)
β
You begin to forget what it means to live. You forget things. You forget that you used to feel all right. You forget what it means to feel all right because you feel like shit all the time, and you can't remember what it was like before. People take the feeling of full for granted. They take for granted the feeling of steadiness, of hands that do not shake, heads that do not ache, throats not raw with bile and small rips of fingernails forced to haste to the gag spot. Stomachs that do not begin to wake up in the night, calves and thighs knotting in muscles that are beginning to eat away at themselves. they may or may not be awakened at night by their own inexplicable sobs.
β
β
Marya Hornbacher (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia)
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About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enoughβand even miraculous enough if you insistβI attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?
Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of othersβwhile in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocityβso the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentitiesβ¦ but there, there. Enough.
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Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)