Memoirists From The United States

"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."

"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?"

"I wish to see every feminist say to herself: 'Yes, the patriarchy has taken my life from me, but also I have given it. I am not going to waste the rest of it in an avalanche of reproach. I am going to fight the patriarchy, but my real energy goes to the hard, drudging work of making myself human—as well as humane. Men may have taken my life from me—but they cannot give it back to me. Only I can do that, fighting inch by inch to reverse the emotional habits of a lifetime.'"

"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."

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

"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."

"I want to say: have faith, my sister. The place in which we now find ourselves is unavoidable, but soon it will prove insupportable; soon it will prove emotionally unsatisfying, and with that emotional dissatisfaction comes another leap toward understanding, and with that, the automatic courage to press further and be off down that road once again."

"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."

"What Marxists share with capitalists is a profound belief that we are all defined, utterly and entirely, by our functional circumstances in The System. And, indeed, no one could deny the truth of this insight; certainly, I would never deny it. Nevertheless, for me, the beauty of feminism is that it is a social and political movement that has redefined the power and obligation of the self: self-possession and self-regulation as a tool for social reform. ("The Price of Paying Your Own Way")"

"Slogans deaden us. They reduce our ability to see clearly, to experience ourselves anew, to replenish the continually flagging urgency that must be kept alive at all times in this war of nerves and emotions that threatens at every turn to undo us. What is necessary is the ability to call the shots exactly as they are being played; to see our life in all its complexity; to recognize that sometimes we are the victims and sometimes men are the victims, but neither of us is always the victim. To fail to see that is to fail to see the truth of our lives, and without the truth we will never come close to possessing ourselves, for self-possession is the ability to face without fear life in all its contradictions. What has made men our oppressors is their inability to face the contradictions, but what will allow us to become strong is our increased ability to face the contradictions. That, to me, is feminism carried to its magnificent conclusion. ("Feminist Writers: Hanging Ourselves on a Party Line")"

"Awareness of the self is more acutely at the heart of things than it has ever been before. On the foundation of self-awareness alone rest all our hopes for a new politics, a new society, a revitalized life. If we do not genuinely know ourselves, the void will now, at last, surely rise up to meet us. ("Why Do These Men Hate Women?")"

"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."

"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..."

"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."

"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."

"At first, when you push beyond your perceived capability your mind won't shut the fuck up about it. It wants you to stop so it sends you into a spin cycle of panic and doubt, which only amplifies your self-torture. But when you persist past that to the point that pain fully saturates the mind, you become single-pointed. The external world zeroes out. Boundaries dissolve and you feel connected to yourself, and to all things, in the depth of your soul. That's what I was after. Those moments of tiotal connection and power, which came through me again in an even deeper way as I reflected on where I'd come from and all I'd put myself through."

"I wish I could more fully express what it's like to defy the medical mind to parachute into wildfires at forty-seven years old. I find the sensation almost impossible to describe. All I can say is that I hope you and everyone else get to feel this one day because to overcome all obstacles and bump up against the outer reaches of your capabilities is the pinnacle. In those rare, fleeting moments when you are washed in the sense of infinite possibility and overwhelmed with glory, everything they ever did to you or put in front of you- all the knockdowns, breakdowns, and fuck-yous and every bit of the pain, doubt, and humiliation- is fucking worth it. But the only way to get there is to continually seek greatness and always be willing to try one more time. I never needed to be the hardest motherfucker in the world. That became a goal because I knew it would bring out my best self. Which is what this fucked-up world needs from all of us: to evolve into the very best version of ourselves. That's a moving target, and it isn't a one-time task. It is a lifelong quest for more knowledge, more courage, more humility, and more belief. Because when you summon the strength and discipline to live like that, the only thing limiting your horizons is you."

"David Goggins is a Retired Navy SEAL and the only member of the U.S. Armed Forces to complete SEAL training, Army Ranger School, and Air Force Tactical Air Controller training. Goggins has completed more than seventy ultra-distance races, often placing in the top five, and is a former Guiness World Record holder for completing 4,030 pull-ups in seventeen hours. A sought-after public speaker, he's traveled the world sharing his philosophy on how to master the mind. When he's not speaking, he works as an Advanced Emergency Technician in a big city Emergency Room and, during the summer, as a wildland firefighter in British Columbia."

"My passion still burns, but to be honest, it takes a bit longer to channel my rage. It's not camped out on my home screen anymore, a single unconscious twitch from overwhelming my heart and head. Now I have to access it consciously. But when I do, I can still feel all the challenges and obstacles, the heartbreak and hard work, like it happened yesterday. That's why you can feel my passion on podcasts and videos. That shit is still there, seared into my brain like scar tissue. Tailing me like a shadow that's trying to chase me down and swallow me whle, but always drives me forward. Whatever failures and accomplishments pile up in the years to come, and there will be plenty of both I'm sure, I know I'll continue to give it my all and set goals that seem impossible to most. And when those motherfuckers say so, I'll look them dead in the eye and respond with one simple question. What if?"

"At forty-three, my wildland firefighting career is just getting started. I love being part of a team of hard motherfuckers like them, and my ultra career is about to be born again too. I'm just young enough to bring the hell on and still get out there and get after it. I'm running faster now than I ever have, and I don't need any tape or props for my feet. When I was thirty-three I ran at an 8:35 per mile pace. Now I'm running 7:15 per mile very comfortably. I'm still getting used to this new, flexible, fully functioning body, and getting accustomed to my new self."

"Most people live their whole lives without ever contemplating what it means to be great. To them, greatness looks like Steph Curry, Rafael Nadal, Toni Morrison, Georgia O'Keeffe, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or Amelia Earhart. They put all the greats on a pedestal but think of themselves as mere mortals. And that's exactly why greatness eludes them. They turn it into some untouchable plane, impossible for almost anybody to reach, and it never even crosses their mind to aim for it. No matter what I'm doing or which arena I'm engaging in, I will always aim for greatness because I know that we are all mere mortals and greatness is possible for anyone and everyone if they are willing to seek it out in their own soul. In Gogglish terms, greatness is a state of letting go of all your faults and imperfections, scavenging every last bit of strength and energy, and putting it the fuck to use to excel at whatever you set your mind to. Even if some motherfucker out there told you it was impossible. It is a feeling pursued by those rare souls willing to extend themselves beyond reason and pay the cost."

"I don't jump to earth from outer space, but I know that atmospheric line between blue and black. It is the glimmer of greatness that runs right through the human soul. We all have it. Most of us will never see it because to get there requires a willingness to extend yourself to the limit without any guarantee of success."

"Just as words can be redefined, never doubt that we can redefine ourselves. It can feel impossible at times because we live in a world filled with arbitrary boundaries and fixed social lines that are as thick as the walls around a fortress. Worse, we allow those walls to limit us in too many ways. The brainwashing starts early, and it starts at home. The people we grow up with and the environments we grow up in define who we think we are and what we think life is all about. When you're young, you can only know what you see, and if all you are ever exposed to are lazy people, content with mediocrity or who convince you of your own worthlessness, greatness will remain a fantasy. If you live in the ghetto or in a dying industrial or farming town, where buildings are boarded up, addiction runs rampant, and the schools are a mess, that will factor into the possibilities others envision for you and you envision for yourself. But even privileged people can feel shackled by their circumstances. The vast majority of parents don't know what greatness looks like, so they are ill-equipped and afraid to encourage big dreams. They want their children to have security and don'r want them to experience failure. That's how limited horizons get passed down from generation to generation."

"There are no prerequisites to becoming great. You could be raised by a pack of wolves. You could be homeless and illiterate at thirty years old and graduate from Harvard at forty. You could be one of the most accomplished motherfuckers in the country and still be hungrier and work harder than everybody else you know as you attempt to conquer a new field. And it all starts with a commitment to looking beyond your known world. Beyond your street, town, state, or nationality. Only then can true self-exploration begin. After that comes the real work. Fighting those demons every morning and all day long is maddening. Because they only ever want to break you down. They don't encourage you or make you feel good about yourself or your long odds as you fight through all the toxic mold and curst that is self-hate, doubt, and loneliness. They want to limit you. They want you to quit before you get to pliability, where the sacrifice, hard work, and isolation that felt so heavy for so long become your haven. Where after struggling to visualize greatness for years, it is effortless. That's when momentum will gather like an updraft and send you airborne and spiraling toward the outer limits of your known world. It's time to level-up and seek out that blue-to-black line. The line that separates good from great. It is within each of us. #GreatnessIsAttainable #NeverFinished"

"as Freud's views on the childhood source of mental disorder have permeated our culture, there has been mounted a wide campaign of mother-suspicion and mother-discreditation. From Sidney Howard's play The Silver Cord, in the mid-twenties, to Philip Roth's more recent Portnoy's Complaint, our literature has disseminated the idea that American women alternate a diet of husbands with a diet of sons."

"Love idealizes, or at least traditionally that has been one of the differential diagnoses: love idealizes, adds, but sex is just body meeting body, sometimes with love, sometimes with affection, sometimes with neither, just for the fun or satisfaction of it."

"In a speech last year on women's liberation, I said how wonderful it was for us to be living in a period in which Dostoevski's statement that there was no such thing as an ugly woman was at last coming true. Of course I don't mean that absolutely and literally but I said it seriously in that speech because I was talking about the terrible Madison Avenue-contrived notions of sexual attractiveness that were imposed upon the girls of my generation and how dreadful it was to be made to think, as I did, that you had to conform to some impossible standard of advertising beauty in order to be in the sexual running at all. How can anyone of my generation do anything except celebrate the fact that this is no longer how things are?"

"we may protest that women's small contribution to culture doesn't indicate a lack of capacity but merely reflects the way men have contrived things to be: we can blame women's small place in culture on culture. But this leaves unanswered the question of why it is that over so many hundreds of years women have consented to follow the male dictate and allowed men to fashion the culture according to male design. It also leaves unanswered the even more fundamental question of why it is that in every society which has ever been studied-so Margaret Mead tells us-whatever is the occupation of men has the greater prestige"

"I traveled in a world that once was—Hollywood of the war and immediate postwar years. And I existed in a world that never is—the prison of the mind. If what I have learned from these experiences can be summed up in one sentence, it would be this: life is not a movie. But I do not make that point in a sad or regretful way. I can only wonder, if my life had been a movie, would a director have cast Gene Tierney to play the part? The bitter with the sweet makes for a better part."

"It seemed to me, ruled my writing, whatever its subject: my belief that even in an unsatisfactory society the individual is best defined by his social geography."

"What I have found in life-it makes me very sad-is that one friend sustains me in one direction, another in another direction. What's missing are the friends who sustain one altogether."

"To be sure, the part played by television in disturbing the normal rate of national and even international development and in robbing us of the physical distance which formerly separated us from events and therefore forced us to exercise our own minds and imaginations in order to get even a first grasp on history-in-the-making, is not to be underestimated as a factor in our recent dislocation in space and time. The death of John Kennedy, however, made for a subtler and perhaps a more pervasive disturbance in our historical balance. It altered our sense of ourselves as a people; it deprived us of the promise of a future. What could more profoundly affect the motions of time?"

"The word "actress" has always seemed less a job description to me than a title."

"Jealousy is, I think, the worst of all faults because it makes a victim of both parties."

"As long as I was playing someone else, I was fine. When I had to be myself, my problems began."

"I learned that carrying on while you're broken is not the answer. I tried to work harder and harder, thinking that work would cure everything. All it did was make things worse."

"In the forties Diana Trilling could write words that in their sharp moral focus may remind us of some Victorian prophet: "Ours being in all spheres such a 'know-how' culture, a civilization so brilliantly skilled in turning out anything it sets its hand to and yet so appallingly ignorant of what is worth making or to what use the things it makes should be put, we cannot be surprised that our literature, too, shows a marked ascendancy of craft over conscience. Probably there has never been a time when so many people wrote so 'well' as now but to such meager purpose; when, indeed, the emptier a novel's content, the surer its technical proficiency." If the reader thinks that sounds more like a critic than a book reviewer, he is right. And as a critic, Diana Trilling has range; she is not satisfied to leave literature sitting there uninterpreted in its fullest psychological, social, and political meaning, for she perceives that "literature is no mere decoration of life but an index of the health or sickness of society." It follows that "just as dictatorship, war, and all the other hideous phenomena of our political day undoubtedly answer a profound need in the modern mass-personality, so the debasement of our literary standards reflects a loss of standard throughout our lives.""

"Wealth, beauty, and fame are transient. When those are gone, little is left except the need still to be useful, even though the parts get fewer."

"I don't think the Hollywood community is interested in what I can do, That's all right. I've never looked for a job in my life, and I'm not going to start now. I have plenty to keep me busy.""

"I think there is a genetic factor involved [...] If there is a history of alcoholism in your family, watch it."

"I feel that the people who pushed me the most, including the teachers, are the ones who made the greatest impression on me and loved me the most."

"An honest look because one of the things a recovered alcoholic must learn is honesty. I have to live with myself."

"She's an actress. . . . She was a little bit Irish. And she decided she wanted to be two years younger."

"You could be anything in front of that microphone, and that is what was expected of you."

"I believe we should learn to appreciate our loneliness, loneliness is marvelous."

"At some point in life, she began giving her birth date as St. Patrick's Day 1918."

"I don’t profess to be any one religion, I think all religions are flawed because people are flawed. But we have the potential and capacity to be bigger than our flaws."

"....The talent is here. The opportunities aren't. And it is the opportunities that foster growth."

"Poetry has been an instrument of change and revolution since it existed. It is protest and defiance and celebration and a love anthem. It is how we communicate so of course it is also how we enact change."