Top 30 Memoir Women Quotes
#1. The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.
Kate Zambreno
#2. I write so that my handful of pebbles, cast daily into still waters, will produce a ripple.
Anne Schroeder
#3. I was promising myself strength.
I had to write it, say it, make the effort and fake it before I actually believed I could do it.
Aspen Matis
#4. I have tried to fight the impulse, the attraction, but my defenses crumble every time I see him. Since my divorce from Hank I'm practically love-starved.
Martha Lemasters
#5. I notice perfume smells on his shirts and even later hours. I suspect he's having an affair but really don't care.
Martha Lemasters
#6. I also get that we women in particular must work very hard to keep our fantasies as clearly and cleanly delineated from our realities as possible, and that sometimes it can take years of effort to reach such a point of sober discernment.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#8. ...I didn't want to be a passenger on someone else's motorcycle.
I wanted to be the one riding that motherfucker.
Lily Brooks-Dalton
#9. Free love, man, Free Love! Which, by the way, was the single greatest concept a young man has ever heard. About three years late, women got wise an my frustration returned to normal levels.
Steve Martin
#10. I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.
Kate Zambreno
#11. Haunted by demons of the past, hounded by demons not yet met, the nevermore and evermore left her little peace." ~A Tale of Two Women
Kimberly Kinrade
#12. Popeye the Sailor Man has more cultural longevity. Only women and poofs read or write now. Otherwise, these days, no sooner has someone been sodomised by a close relative than they think they can write a memoir. The game's up.
Hanif Kureishi
#13. She told me that women who wore makeup had bad values. Putting on makeup would have been a statement - a rebellion. I didn't try it. I grew to feel guilty for wanting to feel attractive.
Aspen Matis
#14. All too often, those of us who choose to remain childless are accused of being somehow unwomanly or unnatural or selfish, but history teaches us that there have always been women who went through life without having babies.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#15. I had lots of appointments, many places to go, and I needed a lot of rest; the art of constructively selling oneself requires much tender self-care
Aphrodite Phoenix
#16. Hey everyone. This is Elizabeth Stone, the one who wrote a A BOY I ONCE KNEW and BLACK SHEEP AND KISSING COUSINS. To those of you who read either one, thanks! But another Elizabeth Stone, not me, wrote WOMEN AND THE CUBAN REVOLUTION and VALLEY OF THE SHADOW. Just setting the record straight!
Elizabeth Stone
#17. My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated.
Joyce Carol Oates
#18. I am not your dog that you whistle for; I'm not a stray animal you call over, and I am not, I never have been, nor will I ever be, your "baby"!
Joy Jennings
#19. If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line.
Baby Halder
#20. Children are often like hostages under the care of authority, with spankings and groundings nudging them like guns pointed at their skulls, threatening to shoot if the wrong words are uttered.
Maggie Young
#21. Of the twenty- three men and women who served in Dwight Eisenhower's cabinets, only one, the secretary of agriculture, published a memoir afterward, and it was so discreet as to be soporific.
David Brooks
#22. I hope to offer the personal as a way to connect to the universal, not a claim for one universal experience of having breasts, but a universal hope for kindness - to each other and our selves and our bodies.
Ruth Daniell
#23. Kerry Cohen's powerful, transfixing story will be familiar to many women, most of whom won't want to admit it. In this heartfelt and authentic memoir, Cohen transcends the pain and shame of a promiscuous past, and leaves readers with a sense of hope and triumph.
Janice Erlbaum
#24. Sex is not a wizard, whatever magical-seeming properties it might possess in its better forms. If your friend says to you, "You're being mean, you need to get laid," your problem is not sex. Your problems are that you might be acting like an asshole, and your friends are definitely idiots.
Katie Heaney
#25. The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."
Kate Zambreno
#26. I voted for every woman who has to leave a baby too soon, who has to downgrade her career, or who is made to feel invisible in her role as a mother.
Erin Passons
#27. The real mistake of women was to let the memoir, the collective, the history, space of producing history - to let it in the hands of men.
Fatema Mernissi
#28. Is that the ultimate need? To secure some agent to act as a salve, a bandage, a cover-up, concealer over the black eye, as opposed to facing the issue head on. Nobody wants to address the fist. We'd all much rather take something for the pain and make it all go away.
Katandra Jackson Nunnally
#29. I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him
they were part of his "road," the infinite range of experience that always had to remain open to fuel his work.
Joyce Johnson
#30. I no longer believe there's any such thing as losing a woman. A man loses himself as women slip into the future.
Josh Wagner
