Personal Narrative Writing:
        Some quotes to think about, that speak to what we are all about.
 
 
         "My story is not important because it is mine... but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is yours.  Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track... of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way, because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity... that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally... to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly, but spiritually.
         "I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets.  And you are yours.  Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human."
             -Frederick Buechner
 
 
 
         "Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin."
             -Barbara Kingsolver
 
 
 
         "The discovery of being bound to a particular society and a particular history, to particular sounds and a particular idiom, is for the writer the beginning of a recognition of himself as a finite subject, limited, the beginning of a recognition that first puts his work in a real human perspective for him.  It is a perspective which shows him his creaturehood."
             -Flannery O'Conner
 
 
         "For the writer there is no oblivion.  Only endless memory."
             -Anita Brookner
 
 
         "You look out the window, and you see the tip of a tiger outside, and you know there's a whole tiger attached to that tip, and you wonder about the tiger."
             -Mekeel McBride
 
 
 

"Part of becoming a writer is the desire to have everything mean something."
             -Louise Erdrich
 

         "If we had to say what writing is, we would define it essentially as an act of courage."
             -Cynthia Ozick

 
 
         "A story isn't about a moment in time, a story is about the moment in time."
             -W. D. Wetherall

 

         "You don't write about the horrors of war.  No.  You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road."
             -Richard Price
 

 “You don’t look back along time, but down through it, like water.  Sometimes this comes to the surface; sometimes that; sometimes nothing”
     -Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye
 

 “All poets are liars.”
     -Maxine Kumin
 

 "Planning to write is not writing.  Outlining... researching... talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing."
             -E. L. Doctorow