Literary, Memoir Quotes

Excerpt from Revolution from Within: A Book of Self Esteem

One thing is clear: The human mind can imagine both how to break self-esteem and how to nurture it – and imaging anything is the first step toward creating it. Believing in a true self is what allows a true self to be born.

Gloria Steinam

Excerpt from Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

Grace means you’re in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.

Anne Lamott

Excerpt from The Cancer Journals

Maybe this is the chance to live and speak those things I really do believe, that power comes from moving into whatever I fear most that cannot be avoided. But will I ever be strong enough again to open my mother and not have a cry of raw pain leap out?

Audre Lorde

Excerpt from Writing from the Heart: Tapping the Power of Your Inner Voice

How much longer do you want to deprive yourself of breaking out in order to protect others from you you really are?… Are you protecting yourself from the same truth they (family) taught you wasn’t good for you? Maybe you have to get a lock and key, maybe you have to tell them the truth, maybe you have to get a combination safe, but don’t sacrifice your soul to keep the illusions in your family alive.

Things are not great in the world. Do you think it’s because the air is polluted, or because the acid rain is killing the trees in the rain forest, or because cancer is on the increase, or because we found out our priests weren’t perfect, or because movies are violent?

We are hurting because we aren’t real and because we don’t live real. Because if we were living in truth, we wouldn’t let any of those abused in our world happen. We would understand the interconnectedness of ourselves with nature and with the planet and with our souls and with each other.

What makes writing powerful is the universality of the truth. All of us want the same thing. We all want to be validated for what we are – not who people want us to be. …

If you develop an honesty in your relationship with your words, you will begin to feel the courage to stand up for more of what you believe in your life. The writing will be like a little rehearsal for when you decide to take the big stand. After you’ve written it you’ll be surprised how much easier it will be to let those thoughts just roll off that courageous silver tongue of yours.

Nancy Slonim Aronie

Excerpt from Devotion: A Memoir

So what is to be done? It was the question at the core of all the questions I had been asking. Life is suffering. There is no way around it. The human condition-the knowledge of this-drives many of us to drink, to drugs, to denial, to running as fast as we can away from the truth of life’s fragility. We think we can shore ourselves up. If only we work hard enough, make lots of money, are good and kind enough, pray hard enough, we will somehow be exempt. Then we discover that no one is exempt.

Dani Shapiro

Except from Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Why? I am asked. What do you bring that up? Must you talk about that? I asked myself the same questions until finally I began to understand. That was a wall in my life, I say, a wall I had to climb over every day. It was always there for me, deflecting my rage toward people who knew nothing about what had happened to me or why I should be angry at them.

It took me years to get past the rage, to say the words with grief and insistence but to let go of the anger, to refuse to use the anger against people who knew nothing of the rape. I had to learn how to say it, how to say “rape,” say “child,” say “unending,” “awful,” and “relentless,” and say it the way I do – adamant, unafraid, unashamed, ever time, all over again – to speak my words as a sacrament, a blessing, a prayer. Not a curse. Getting past the anger, getting to the release, I become someone else, and the story changes. I am no longer a grown-up outraged child but a woman letting go of her outrage, showing what I know: that evil is a man who imagines the damage he does in not damage, that evil is the act of pretending that some things do not happen or leave no mark if they do, that evil is not what remains when healing becomes possible.

At the things I can say about sexual abuse- about rape- none of them are reasons. They words no not explain. Explanations almost drove me crazy, other people’s explanations and my own. Explanations, justifications, and theories. I’ve got my own theory. My theory is that rape goes on happening all the time. My theory is that everything said about the act is assumed to say something about me, as if that thing I never wanted to happen and did not know how to stop is the only thing that can be said about my life. My theory is that talking about it makes a difference – being a woman who can stand up anywhere and say, I was five and the man was big.

Dorothy Allison, pg. 43 and 44