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