Memoirists From The United States

"Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished."

"I have already seen the butterfly garden, and I'd like to thank everybody who made that possible. And the movie, and I'm sentimental already. I have known Jimmy Carter for most of my life — I think for all of my life except when I was very small. He likes to say that he was my next-door neighbor when I was born, and he looked through the bars on the cradle and saw me. I didn't recognize him then."

"I hope that no one will ever tell a girl that there is something she can’t do because she is a girl. I hope that women have and embrace the power to change things, so that every person can choose a life that offers them respect from others and deep satisfaction for themselves. I hope that equal education and equal opportunities are available for women to grow to their maximum potential, whatever that is. I hope women will use political power to make the world a better place and claim a natural role as the world’s peacemakers."

"Scientific advancements over the past three decades have greatly improved our understanding of the causes, nature, and treatment of many diseases and disabilities, including mental illnesses. Attention to the social determinants of health has led to the identification of risk factors and underlying causes of disadvantage and illness. Technology has made possible unparalleled public access to information so that more and more Americans know that treatments work and are available. Additionally, social networking provides multiple platforms from which advocates and consumers can organize and unite efforts to improve quality of life and address issues such as resiliency and recovery."

"Compassion is what makes our nation great. When we invest in the health and happiness of our fellow Americans, we reap dividends that pay off for generations. We urge our leaders to support all those Americans who are seeking to restore and maintain their physical and mental health. We can think of no better way to strengthen our economy, our communities, and our families."

"American women have increasingly realized — as have men — the impact our opinions have in the voting booth and the marketplace. We have united to impact politics and policy, but also importantly to use our influence to help the poor, the oppressed, and those who suffer from mental or physical illnesses."

"I wanted to take mental illnesses and emotional disorders out of the closet, to let people know it is all right to admit having a problem without fear of being called crazy. If only we could consider mental illnesses as straightforwardly as we do physical illnesses, those affected could seek help and be treated in an open and effective way."

"Recovery is one prevalence. Mental illness affects all of us. They touch every family in our country. One in four Americans is diagnosed with mental illness every year, one in four. This is one reason why I cannot understand why stigma is still so bad because everybody knows somebody, if not a family member, a close friend, living with a mental illness. Stigma is the third thing. Stigma is the greatest barrier to seeking care for individuals who have mental illness, the greatest barrier for a person with a mental illness. And it’s the greatest barrier for those of us in the field who are trying to do something about it."

"To neglect those who, through no fault of their own, are in need, runs counter to our values, our decency and equality. Today, with our knowledge and expertise, we have a great opportunity to change things forever, for all people with mental illnesses, with what we know now, to move forward to a new era of understanding, care and respect."

"A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be."

"I want people to know that mental illnesses can be diagnosed, can be treated. The overwhelming majority of people can live full and productive lives in the community. People don’t know that. That’s one reason I wrote the book. But I want everybody to know what I know, so we can get over the stigma and go on to do what is good and right for people with mental illnesses."

"We need to end the silence and put pressure on governments and the private sector to prioritize mental health care reform. And the reform process needs to be guided by informed decision-making that includes the voices and stories of people with lived experience."

"Thirty years is a long time in the history of caregiving as an issue in our country. The world was a very different place then. We used push-button phones, not cell phones, and had big word processors, not personal computers. There were social clubs, not social media, and people took care of each other because of a sense of familial responsibility. You didn’t hear much about “caregivers,” not because they didn’t exist but because what they were doing was quite common, and it was expected."

"Maybe a hundred years from now we can say "We the People" and include all of the people of this great country of ours. If what we heard from each other and from our young people is an example of changing attitudes, we can truly look forward to the future as a golden age for women."

"Speaking up about this subject can be difficult. But the time has come for people who have lived with mental health disorders to make sure their voices are heard."

"And what will that future hold? Perhaps none have a greater right to ask that question than the young people of this country, and none are more qualified to answer. The ten teenage essay winners who participated in the opening ceremony had been asked: "How will women have changed this country by the year 2087?" Although they came from places as diverse as Dorchester, Alaska and the Bronx, New York, each was chosen because she or he had expressed a unique opinion or insight into the future role of women in our society."

"It can be dangerous, too, getting so involved in the minutiae of a setting."

"There does seem to be an inclination to find ways to prolong life among people who have the most resources."

"I am always striving to push the limits of categories, and if people have a hard time classifying me, I see that as a very good thing."

"As far as I’m concerned: good writing is good writing, wherever you shelve it."

"My advice to all writers is to spend the time you need learning to write a great story. Read widely and write every day. Don’t limit yourself to a certain kind of writing, and write what inspires you."

"... the surest sign that a new year is beginning is that everybody is on a self-improvement-drive. From at 8th Street, to at 68th, half of New York is registering at some college for night courses in Philosophy or the History of Art which most of them will drop out of on the first sleeting winter night. And I, who hate novels, have begun lugging Joyce Carol Oates and V. S. Naipaul and Doris Lessing home from the library, in an attempt to Improve my Mind."

"Q () was all by himself my college education."

"FPD! CRISIS! I sent that package off. The chief item in it was a 6-pound ham. I figured you could take it to a butcher and get it sliced up so everybody would have some to take home. But I just noticed on your last invoice it says: "B. Marks, M. Cohen." Props. ARE THEY KOSHER? I could rush a tongue over. ADVISE PLEASE!"

"... I was haunted by the fact that I didn't have an education and that I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write plays but I didn't seem to realize there was something wrong with not liking to read plays."

"all the liberationist movements have taken these classes of people, blacks, women, gays, and instructed them now in these years that not only is it your right to act like a whole human being, but it's your obligation. So I’ve watched, for much longer than you, how women have entered all of these professions that they never dreamed they could enter. And it's a thrill to watch people, especially the young, who take their place in the world without any perturbation, without being perturbed in any way about their right, much less their obligation, to occupy a space. And I feel it's our struggle that gave them this. If it wasn’t for what we went through, women forty years younger than me would never have... they go into it without thinking twice, as if there's no question. And it's always like that. Nobody lives historically, everybody lives in the intense present. So whatever we have supplied for their present is [received with] “hasn't it always been like this? Is there any other way to do it?” But it has to do with that assumption that a wholeness of being gives you the right and the obligation to make the largest sense of what you are about in the world no matter what you are."

"I will never feel I'm an intellectual, never in my entire life. What I call intellection has really to do with making a large sense of abstractions. Whereas I start so completely from specific, on the ground experience, and out of that I do think I have a feeling intelligence. It's not an abstract one, it's not an intellectual one. But I know how to, and want very much, to use my intelligence, to elucidate my feelings in such a way that it brings new life to the work at hand."

"Jewish women in second-wave feminism helped to provide the theoretical underpinnings and models for radical action that were seized on and imitated throughout the United States and abroad. Their articles and books became classics of the movement and led the way into new arenas of cultural and political understanding in academe, politics, and grassroots organizing. Even a partial honor roll of Jewish women's liberation pioneers must include such figures as Shulamith Firestone, Ellen Willis, Robin Morgan, Alix Kates Shulman, Naomi Weisstein, Heather Booth, Susan Brownmiller, Marilyn Webb, Meredith Tax, Andrea Dworkin, Linda Gordon, Ellen DuBois, Ann Snitow, Marge Piercy, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Vivian Gornick. Despite historians' acknowledgment of the salience of Jewish women in earlier social movements, their prominence within radical feminism failed to attract much attention."

"it’s my job as a writer to put the pieces together brilliantly. To put them all together so that they serve so well that I feel acutely the humanness of the situation as well as the politicalness of it."

"Thinking is the hardest thing in the world. The mind resists order...You have this flash of insight, then you have to put flesh on it. Days of misery follow – after which, out comes only an approximation of what you originally thought and felt."

"I want to dramatise it not moralise over it. I didn't want to lecture or keep pointing things out to the reader, which is what a polemic does."

"The cultural-political perspectives of Jewish feminists interacted with the ideas of many other pioneering women's liberationists in the city, Jewish and non-Jewish, including Kathie Sarachild, Carol Hanisch, Irene Peslikis, Peggy Dobbins, Anne Koedt, Pat Mainardi, Robin Morgan, Ann Snitow, and Vivian Gornick. Acting within a communal context, innovative theory and practice emerged from group interaction."

"It came from a piece in which I said that a time will come when men and women will approach each other at eye level – an idea, and a phrase, to which I was devoted."

"at least they're active, at least they have a notion that working is more important than getting married and having children. And for that, I have hope. I have lots of hope."

"It's a much longer struggle than we ever dreamed of, and it's painful to see how the same battles must be fought again and again. When #MeToo happened in 2017, I couldn't believe my ears. They were saying everything we'd said 40 years ago. But then I realised that every generation repeats and repeats – until it’s over. It isn't over until it’s over."

"All my life I've made do with less, because 'stuff' makes me anxious."

"The exchange will always deepen, even if the friendship does not."

"If a memoir is to achieve literature, it has to have an organizing principle, it has to have an idea, it has to have something that will be of value to the disinterested reader. And that doesn’t happen so often, because most people who are writing memoirs are not writers...The ability to turn yourself into a persona who is able to generate drama, narrative drive, conflict, all the things that are required, is very hard, and not too many people achieve it."

"Loneliness, the difficulty involved in becoming an independent yet attached person, and the way to find a reasonable agreement between these two positions: these are existential questions, and that's where the women's movement tapped in so deep by asking them [...] But to name these things is not to cure them. It's a battle every day. We struggle to bring to life what we say and believe. Our insides tell us one thing, but living that out is quite another."

"There are two categories of friendship: those in which people enliven one another and those in which people must be enlivened to be with one another. In the first category one clears the decks to be together; in the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule."

"Ultimately, our art is a reflection of the progress of our desires chained to our fears. The meaning of a social movement is that it rises directly out of a gut need to defeat the ascendancy of fear. That need becomes an idea which takes hold slowly, and slowly forces emotional—hence cultural and political—change."

"I began to realize what everyone in the world knows and routinely forgets: that to be loved sexually is to be loved not for one's actual self but for one's ability to arouse desire in the other...Only the thoughts in one's mind or intuitions of the spirit can attract permanently..."

"Art and psychoanalysis are both reflections of the natural process of human growth: the adult body rises from the childish form, the mature mind flows directly out of the early personality. All is of a piece, all clearly related, logically concluded. The conscious relatedness of one's entire existence is what produces the integrated self; the recognition that what one is now one has always been — to hold live in one's hand the sense of what one has always been — is to have oneself. For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience."

"that is the whole sickening trickery in life — the idea that one cannot fight for one's humanity without, ironically, losing it — and it is a piece of trickery that the blacks sometimes seem helpless against and the women now sometimes seem helpless against, and, in the final analysis, that trickery is the real enemy and the very essence of the thing we must continually be on our guard against. For what shall it profit a woman if she gain an end to slavery in marriage and in the process lose her soul?"

"Vast internal changes must occur in women in which old responses, old habits, old emotional convictions are examined under a new light: the light of consciousness."

"One's own best self. For centuries, this was the key concept behind any essential definition of friendship: that one's friend is a virtuous being who speaks to the virtue in oneself. How foreign such a concept to the children of the therapeutic culture! Today we do not look to see, much less affirm, our best selves in one another. To the contrary, it is the openness with which we admit to our emotional incapacities - the fear, the anger, the humiliation - that excites contemporary bonds of friendship. Nothing draws us closer to one another than the degree to which we face our deepest shame openly in one another's company... What we want is to feel known, warts and all: the more warts the better. It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are."

"My late blooming was very much attached to my being a girl. It's a major thing, being a girl. But after that, you also have to figure in the personal neuroses of each human being. I was smart. My mother saw it, and decided I should get an education – but I had to remember that love was the most important thing in a woman's life. College was only to protect me against the possibility that my husband would die or leave me stranded. I was so hesitant to believe in myself."

"For many of us the initial feminist understanding came as a kind of explosion: shattering, scattering, everything tumbling about, the old world within splintering even as the new one was collecting. But there were moments of perfect, clarifying calm when the thing, as it were, was "grasped whole." And these moments were there from the very beginning, then lost, then recovered, again lost, again recovered, lurching forward in the unshapely manner of one proceeding through uncharted territory with a compass that works only intermittently."

"Thinking clearly is, I believe, the road to freedom. It was in the spirit of that feminist essential that I have tried to write."

"The feminist perspective has grown immeasurably throughout American life because feminist consciousness has thrived and become ever more sophisticated whereas feminist dogma has shriveled and become ever more parochial."