Manic A Memoir Quotes

My creative process is a bit manic at times, to be honest. I wake up Monday and Thursday stressed because I don't have a video. I usually - with the exception of maybe a handful of videos - wake up, write the video, shoot the video, edit the video, release the video all in the same day. ~ Lilly Singh

We soon got the idea that 'Italian' meant something inferior, and a barrier was erected between children of Italian origin and their parents. This was the accepted process of Americanization," Covello reflected in his memoir The Heart Is the Teacher. "We were becoming Americans by learning how to be ashamed of our parents. ~ Maria Laurino

Bipolar illness, manic depression, manic-depressive illness, manic-depressive psychosis. That's a nice way of saying you will feel so high that no street drug can compete and you will feel so low that you wish you had been hit by a Mack truck instead. ~ Christine F. Anderson

Trust me, never mock a romance book," said Mal with all the zest of a manic street preacher. "You have no idea the amount of good they can do for you between the sheets and on the streets. If you love you girl? Buy her books. ~ Kylie Scott

Manic depression - or bipolar disorder - is like racing up to a clifftop before diving headfirst into a cavity. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is the psychic equivalent of an extreme sport. The manic highs - that exhilarating rush to the top of the cliff - make you feel bionic in your hyper-energized capacity for generosity, sexiness and soulfulness. You feel like you have ingested stars and are now glowing from within. It's unearned confidence-in-extremis - with an emphasis on the con, because you feel cheated once you inevitably crash into that cavity. I sometimes joke that mania is the worst kind of pyramid scheme, one that the bipolar individual doesn't even know they're building, only to find out, too late, that they're also its biggest casualty. ~ Diriye Osman

You get a bad review with a novel, and it hurts. But I imagine if you get a bad review with a memoir, it hurts more because you can always say, 'Well, they didn't like my characters,' but when you're the character, it's like, 'Oh, yeah, they actually didn't like me.' ~ Darin Strauss

A memoir, at its heart, is written in order to figure out who you are. ~ Sean Wilsey

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each. ~ Darin Strauss

Realism is for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and convention subject matter. Re-Fi is a repetitive genre written by unimaginative hacks who rely on mere mimesis. If they had any self-respect they'd be writing memoir, but they're too lazy to fact-check. Of course I never read Re-Fi. But the kids keep bringing home these garish realistic novels and talking about them, so I know that it's an incredibly narrow genre, completely centered on one species, full of worn-out cliches and predictable situations--the quest for the father, mother-bashing, obsessive male lust, dysfunctional suburban families, etc., etc. All it's good for is being made into mass-market movies. Given its old-fashioned means and limited subject matter, realism is quite incapable of describing the complexity of contemporary experience. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I recount as this journey begins where I rest to gather the tale from this
same old house resting on the hill, leaving me a view of a carnival once seen from just across the tracks. My pallet is dry now. The colors I see no more. The rain has washed away many of the signs that once stood for a prosper
home and family. My grave is waiting. The dreams once filled my head with
images of world unison, hope and companionship for all. The saga spoken
through my canvas drew darker as the years went on to the bitter cold nights.
All that comes to me now are glimpses of faces that graced my soul. ~ Kris Courtney

The memoir was a very personal book. I wrote it as a personal journey and search about who my father was and how my family had come together and come apart - sorting all that out, you know, issues of personal identity. ~ Barack Obama

This sound, which like all music--indeed, like all pleasure--I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through its rooms, the festivals, the love and work, the honestly earned slumber, the voices and the nimble commotion, the perennial tribe of cats and dogs and birds, "laughter and ability and Sighing, And Frocks and Curls." All this I realized was more than I could ever abandon, even as what I had set out so deliberately to do was more than I could inflict on those memories, and upon those, so close to me, with whom the memories were bound. And just as powerfully I realized I could not commit this desecration on myself. ~ William Styron

Do I perform sometimes in a manic style? Yes. Am I manic all the time? No. Do I get sad? Oh yeah. Does it hit me hard? Oh yeah. ~ Robin Williams

I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society ... unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool. ~ Tina Fey

Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It's not just raw reportage flung splat on the page. ~ Mary Karr

Although my understanding of exactly how much trouble I was in grew more specific over time, as a child I surely understood enough about my condition to know it was something I'd better keep private. By intuition I was certain that the thing I knew to be true was something others would find both impossible and hilarious. My conviction, by the way, had nothing to do with a desire to be feminine, but it had everything to do with being female. Which is an odd believe for a person born male. It certainly had nothing to do with whether I was attracted to girls or boys. This last point was the one that, years later, would most frequently elude people, including the overeducated smarty-pants who constituted much of my inner circle. But being gay or lesbian is about sexual orientation. Being transgedered is about identity. ~ Jennifer Finney Boylan

Don't think of Diana Vreeland's memoir as a book; it's more like a lunch. A bit of souffle, a glass of champagne, some green grapes - light, bubbly and slightly tart - all served up by an egocentric but inventive hostess. ~ Cathleen McGuigan

Autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs. ~ George Eliot

That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project. ~ Alison Bechdel

Former president George W. Bush released his new memoir. By the way, 'memoir' is just a fancy word for 'a bunch of stuff that happened to me. ~ Craig Ferguson

Remember how we put stickers with your name on your pocessions that could be stolen.We didn't put a sticker on your innocence so don't lose it! ~ Candace Allan

Debbie Downer was one of the few sketches where I broke, and I remember watching Heratio Sanz laugh so hard that tears squirted out of his eyes. I still believe that sketch may be a cure for low-level depression if watched regularly. ~ Amy Poehler

I wondered if he thought this was a real emergency or another dramatic thing - I am constantly in some panic or despair, it seems. I worried more than I could breathe.

Mailhot, Terese Marie. Heart Berries: A Memoir (p. 106). Counterpoint. Kindle Edition. ~ Terese Marie Mailhot

I don't really believe in faeries. But I really want to. Not just for me, but for all of us. Because we are battered by adulthood- by taxes, by loss, by laundry. by nine to five, by deceit and distrust, by the crushing desire to be thin, successful, popular, happy, in love. All the while we are walking on a planet that is disintigrating around us. ~ Signe Pike

In 2005, my mad half, HER was born...
ME & HER: a Memoir of Madness, 2012. ~ Karen Tyrrell

The morning opens, a mist of innocence appears across the countryside that tells each one of us the day is new. That feeling of hope, love and the humble awareness of our duty becomes clear if even for a moment. It is that experience of inspiration that follows us into a small town woken by a cool frost on this Sunday morning and the laughter of children playing. ~ Kris Courtney

In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out. ~ Gail Sheehy

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

The most difficult thing to do after a life well lived is to sit down and type it all out. To start with, your fingers are old and gnarled. You can see the skin crinkled up like paper, the knobby knuckles, the veins standing up blue and aggressive and you wonder, when did your hands change, when did they stop being young and firm and definite, when did the hesitancy creep in, when did the trembling begin. Your mind sieves through memories as thick as molasses and as bitterly sweet. The words trip on your tongue but hesitate to make their way onto the page because you debate endlessly in your head about which of them you should put down in print, terrified of the permanency of the written word. Memories are the kind of elusiveness that shift, change form, and remodel themselves by the second. It is a challenge to wrestle with them, to get them to agree to be analysed, to be put down in words and encapsulated into sentences, moulded into paragraphs. As long as they are shifting, morphing into different things as the moment suits them, they aren't bound by one person's recollection of how things were, of how they happened. These are my memories.
And this was my life. And so I try to write this. I am already half way through what I am trying to put down. I have no idea who would want to read the story of my life. But I write it out, more for myself, than for anyone else who would care to read. ~ Kiran Manral

My handbag turned into a diaper bag for the chronically ill. ~ Tracey Berkowitz

Many have come to understand that while reality and truth are not always the same, they do not necessarily oppose or preclude one another. The myths of Shiva, the lake and the mountain, Buddhist stories and visualisations, the feeling of a mountain rising: none of these need be literal in order to be considered truthful. Such moments simply point to a truth as complex as the people who seek to understand them. ~ Kavitha Yaga Buggana

George Bowering doesn't play fair. Baseball Love is so good there is no memoir in the league that can go up against it. Bowering has a sense of story and an eye for detail that eliminate the possibility that he was a lousy second baseman. Reading a home run is fun. ~ Robert Kroetsch

The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy. ~ Donald Miller

Christmas is such a time of struggle anyway, crammed with busy and hurry and the expectation that you will be joyful, no matter what. Then, if you're like me, when you just sit quietly, just be, and let yourself feel what you feel, the guilt creeps in. Because you're alive and the world is big, and you should be feeling some freakin' Christmas spirit. ~ Anna White

Writing a memoir is a holistic method of learning and healing by placing responsibility for personal transformation on the spiritual authority of the self. Writing a person's life story is useful to gain a comprehensive understanding regarding a person's maturation, distinctive stages of personal development, and the influences provided by their family and society. The writing processes also serves as a catharsis for painful personal events that a person seeks to integrate into their transmuting being. Writing our personal story, we discover new dimensions of our being. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I doubt that anyone has a Damascus moment after experiencing discrimination. Most people seem to have shining moments of change after experiencing grace. ~ Anna White

Look at what I wrote at the beginning of this memoir. Have I caught anything at all of the extraordinary night when Paul Dempster was born? I am pretty sure that my little sketch of Percy Boyd Staunton is accurate, but what about myself? I have always sneered at autobiographies and memoirs in which the writer appears at the beginning as a charming, knowing little fellow, possessed of insights and perceptions beyond his years, yet offering these with false naivete to the reader, as though to say, 'What a little wonder I was, but All Boy.' Have the writers any notion or true collection of what a boy is?
I have and I have reinforced it by forty-five years of teaching boys. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man. Oh these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots' oaths!
Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man's idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try. And to begin I must give you some notion of the village in which Percy Boyd Staunton and Paul Dempster and I were born. ~ Robertson Davies