Virginia Woolf Quotes

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

I look at the past and I see myself.

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration.

Let me tell you a secret: there is no such thing as an uninteresting life One day you must tell me your full and complete story, unabridged and unexpurgated.We will set aside some time for it, and meet. It's very important. Maneck smiled. 'Why is it important?' It's extremely important because it helps to remind yourself of who you are. Then you can go forward, without fear of losing yourself in this ever-changing world.

Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.

Memory is the crux of our humanity. Without memory we have no identities. That is really why I am committing an autobiography.

I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.

That's a part of me going back to what I used to do.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

I'm not fond of biographies. I don't like writing about myself.

One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead.

To be human is to have a collection of memories that tells you who you are and how you got there.

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

One day I asked myself, 'What do I have to sell in this world?' And I realised, well, I only can sell what I have in my bag, and what I have in my bag is my past, and this is Cameroon. This is the raw material of my career.

I think, in writing a memoir, you kind of give order to your life.

Today carve out a quiet interlude for yourself in which to dream, pen in hand. Only dreams give birth to change.

We all have those dreams of going back in time and seeing what it was like when our parents were younger. Maybe we don't all have that dream. I don't know. Getting to role play or step back to a different moment in time and see things through a different lens is something that resonated with me, for sure. We don't get to do that, generally, but when the right neurological disorder lines up with the right unstable woman, that moment presents itself. Getting to know where we come from is a really profound way of getting to look at who we are.

It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life.

This may be a little bit of a provocative thing to say, but the memoirist doesn't owe the reader anything other than a good story and the inclining of the mind in the direction of memory. Of course, the memoirist is not allowed to make things up. But the really skilled memoirist knows what to leave in and what to leave out to serve the story. In autobiography you can't do that.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future.

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.