Edgy Memoir Quotes

War reporter Lawrence Sheets's edgy memoir evokes exactly the fatalism, confusion, and centrifugal forces that suddenly broke up the Soviet Union two decades ago. Refreshingly free of faraway theorizing, this book focuses on what people actually saw and experienced in those years. ~ Hugh Pope

From my first stab at second base, I became obsessively concerned for my vaginal upkeep. I began shaving the day after I felt my first tongue down my throat. The first buzz was a disaster, causing horrifically itchy dull razor breakout that made me look like I made love to a poison ivy bush. Whenever I thought there was a chance of unveiling my privates, I smothered every breakout with the same foundation I used for the occasional teenage acne face breakouts. ~ Maggie Young

I wanted to come close to fierce wild things. They seemed prehistoric, rare and sacred. ~ Aspen Matis

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

So I died many times that year.
In the cold, in the storm, on the run or on the drunk for my heart did not want to beat
but kept on beating anyway
and my pain was as real as real can be,
and I tried to learn and deal and run and feel
but nothing really worked.

I built a comfortable home in my sorrow and settled into a quiet living. No sparks or grand gestures, just a simple daily hymn to comfort. The leaves fell off the trees and coloured this city in all kinds of pretty, and some days that was enough to make me smile at least a little bit, within. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

The Stovepipe is a memoir full of laughter and tears and a moving story of sisterly love as well as their will to survive. ~ Dave Pelzer

I've always let my imagination run free, but now I try to rein it in. Things never turn out the way I imagine, so I am letting them rest. Instead, I am holding just what is in my hand. ~ Anna White

Her legacy was not--would not be--this disease. Phyllis Marie Unold Avery told us stories...It is my promise to her that for as long as I am able, I will recognize, restory, and remember. ~ Nancy A. Dafoe

Always tell the absolute truth ...no matter how unbelievable! ~ Michael K Dane

In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years. ~ Steve Martin

Writing is part of life, but it is not part of the ordinary busyness of life. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

It's never the act but the impact of the act that is crucial in a memoir. ~ David Leite

I'm always gonna have the darker edgy music; it is always in my pocket because it comes so naturally to me. ~ Yelawolf

That's the thing about social drinking: In the end, it's the drinking that creates the scene, not the other way around. You grow to relish the buzz, regardless of the situation. Once you're there, really there inside that moment, with its neighbourly warmth and conversation, it's hard to tell what's responsible for producing emotion. What's responsible for the light-headed feeling? Is it the Molson, or the boy who's running his fingers through the ends of your hair? Are you chatty because you're drunk, or because you're connecting with someone on a level that you have never before experienced? ~ Koren Zailckas

No entrepreneur ever wrote a memoir that said, 'Then I did something terribly risky and not all that clever, but once again fortune chose to reward my stupidity. ~ Tim Dowling

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

Wonder Showzen is one of my favorite shows of all time. When I first saw it, I thought it was so funny and new and original and edgy and insane and subversive. I didn't know comedy could do that. ~ Eric Andre

'Amazing Grace' is not a book of interviews or onetime snapshots. It's a memoir of a journey that took me into a place I had never been and took over two years of my life. I don't think the people in this book would have said the things to me that they did if they perceived me as a reporter. ~ Jonathan Kozol

Death doesn't bother me but murder makes me edgy, and my lack of weaponry suddenly felt like a potentially fatal mistake. If we got back to the hotel alive, I wasn't coming back here again without my knife and the baseball bat. And maybe a tank, if I could find one fast enough. ~ Seanan McGuire

It can safely be said that no one has touched more lives, more deeply, than Death. Through this devastating memoir, it is hoped he will touch many, many more. ~ George Pendle

The rasp in his voice did her in. It wasn't the lazy boredom of a jackass who wanted a warm place to stick his dick. It was edgy. ~ Kit Rocha

Men ought to be a four-letter word! Menn! ~ Becky Lewellen Povich

But there is another possible attitude towards the records of the past, and I have never been able to understand why it has not been more often adopted. To put it in its curtest form, my proposal is this: That we should not read historians, but history. Let us read the actual text of the times. Let us, for a year, or a month, or a fortnight, refuse to read anything about Oliver Cromwell except what was written while he was alive. There is plenty of material; from my own memory (which is all I have to rely on in the place where I write) I could mention offhand many long and famous efforts of English literature that cover the period. Clarendon's History, Evelyn's Diary, the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. Above all let us read all Cromwell's own letters and speeches, as Carlyle published them. But before we read them let us carefully paste pieces of stamp-paper over every sentence written by Carlyle. Let us blot out in every memoir every critical note and every modern paragraph. For a time let us cease altogether to read the living men on their dead topics. Let us read only the dead men on their living topics. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I was climbing high, high up Pen Dinas Head among the sparkling yellow gorse, sea birds and white heather, with the oily sheep huddled together against the wind ~ Suzy Davies

Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us to little more than animals, humanity in the shape of our saintly medical officers triumphed over barbarism.
Remember, while it always seems darkest before the dawn, perseverance pays off and the good times will return. ~ Alistair Urquhart

I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense pretty much. ~ Marya Hornbacher

When we invoke stillness within our consciousness, we have the power to recover the child we forgot that we once were. ~ Daniel St. Clair

In Russia, the person who put Sevastopol on the literary map was Leo Tolstoy, a veteran of the siege. His fictionalized memoir The Sebastopol Sketches made him a national celebrity. Already with the first installment of the work published, Tsar Alexander II saw the propaganda value of the piece and ordered it translated into French for dissemination abroad. That made the young author very happy. Compared with Tolstoy's later novels, The Sebastopol Sketches hasn't aged well, possibly because this is not a heartfelt book. As the twenty-six-year-old Tolstoy's Sevastopol diaries reveal, not heartache but ambition drove him at the time. Making a name as an author was just an alternative to two other grand plans - founding a new religion and creating a mathematical model for winning in cards (his losses during the siege were massive even for a rich person). ~ Constantine Pleshakov

When Tito was born, I was writing my fifth novel.

That was how I saw my future: living in Venice and jumping from novel to novel.

Tito's birth changed all that. ~ Diogo Mainardi

All of my secrets and scars and wishes and dreams can live together in this one body without shame, without blame, and without fear. I am all loved, all accepted, and all in service to God. In his eyes, regardless of what I did or didn't do today, I am loved. I am His, so I am enough. ~ Anna White

Voice is the je ne sais quoi of spirited writing. It separates brochures and brilliance, memo and memoir, a ship's log and The Old Man and the Sea. The best writers stamp prose with their own distinctive personality; their timbre and tone are as recognizable as their voices on the phone. To cultivate voice, you must listen for the music of language-the vernacular, the syntactic tics, the cadences. ~ Constance Hale

The man is always the last to know when
Cupid has struck him
-Anonymous, Memoirs of a Mistress ~ Sabrina Jeffries

My parents' attempts to stop my habit were through guilt and force. They grounded me several times. Carl made cracks when he felt that I was eating too much and snide comments on my weight yo-yoing. They sent me to psychiatrists who tried to quick fix me by Paxil, Zoloft, and Effexor prescriptions. All were antidepressants with weight gain for side effects, which might as well have been rat poison for a bulimic. ~ Maggie Young

I'm ready for the day when Mom loves me too much to keep me, and for every other person who will someday see that I'm not worth holding on to. ~ Soojung Jo

Nothing changes everything. ~ Jonathan Marcus

I am forever engaged in a silent battle in my head over whether or not to lift the fork to my mouth, and when I talk myself into doing so, I taste only shame. I have an eating disorder. ~ Jena Morrow

Had I glimpsed just a little of the suffering I would witness and the heartbreak I would endure, I would have fled in the other direction ... But I could not foresee any of these things ... And many years later, with tears in my eyes, I remembered my decision to follow this God no matter what the cost. ~ Daniel Walker

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places. ~ Emma Donoghue

Working with somebody who has a more interesting life than I do - and getting to take on that life temporarily - is an endlessly interesting way to have the experience of writing memoir. ~ Hilary Liftin

We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin. ~ Mary Karr

But that's hindsight for you: never there when you need it. ~ Janet Givens

Writing is a form of intense thinking that takes a person on a journey into previously uncharted territory of the writer's mind. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

In just two years, CSAS ignited the flame Grandmother lit years before. Carl would never succeed in his attempts to extinguish it. But his parental authority was able to keep it dormant and unthreatening for several years. At Ooltewah High School, I was like a lion forced into captivity after a liberating romp in the jungle. Nothing challenged me. Nothing motivated me. Nothing moved me. My claustrophobia itched to the point where clawing at my own skin seemed to be my only method of relief. With no social outlets and no intellectual nourishment, I caved into self-destruction. My bulimia amplified from throwing up obligatory family dinners to driving to grocery stores, Dollar Generals, and gas stations, shoving junk food into my purse in between security camera reach, devouring the calories in the corners of desolate parking lots, and scurrying into remote public restrooms in the outskirts of town. My knees would rest on the cold, sticky tile floors as I wrapped my arms around bleach-scented toilets as if embracing an old friend. ~ Maggie Georgiana Young

My first memoir, 'Home,' was about my childhood, early training and formative years in the Theater, i am so pleased that my good friends at the Hachette Book Group have encouraged me to share the next phase of my life, beginning with my arrival in Hollywood and the wonderful movies and television programs I was asked to be a part of. ~ Julie Andrews

Disney will never make a movie about my life story, and that's a shame
I'd make a really cute animated creature. ~ Kate Bornstein

I want to sling a stone, a small rock into a pool, see it ripple. I want to shake a tree, create a small storm.. ~ Suzy Davies

She taught me only how to need to be taken care of.

I was here because I needed to learn to take responsibility for making my own decisions - to earn my own trust. ~ Aspen Matis

We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned withpot coffin or ceremony, our hasty untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved. ~ Ghada Karmi

Sometimes a soldier returns home and all he can do is share his story in the hopes that somehow, in some way, it helps another soldier make sense of things. And although the stories may not be perfect, sometimes just sharing is enough to make a difference. ~ Michael Anthony

For now I sit on my final island of the present as my radius of memory shrinks; lost already are the islands of work, of old friendships ... Other islands fade as I brood upon them. ~ Chuma Nwokolo

Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From the first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more, more; and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize, and moralize the grasping hand.

His dreams, those priceless comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling round in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other. Politics, religion, ideology - desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsibility for his own actions: abdications. His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest; but he's always trying to hide the one behind the other. ~ M. John Harrison