Elissa Altman > Quotes

“Quiet the noise around you; soften its pitch. Our deepest stories are our best teachers. Let the weapons of the weak — the poison, the nagging, the gossip — burn themselves to ash. Cast them to the wind. Take back the permission to succeed. Make it yours.”
― Elissa Altman

“Do I have the permission to succeed at this? Who am I to tell my stories?

“Who are you to not tell them?” a writer friend said to me. This writer friend — author of novels, memoirs, a short story collection — tells me that it is ownership, the acceptance of the fact that our stories make us who we are, that is the most complicated and treacherous part of what we do. When that ownership is withheld, we cannot succeed. When other forces say, no, that story is not yours, they have not only killed it and its place in your soul; they have killed you.”
― Elissa Altman, Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing

“What are the memory triggers that bend our hearts?
What are the ones that break them?”
― Elissa Altman

“Like the Centralia Mine Fire, my mother and I have been burning for half a century.”
― Elissa Altman, Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing

“did the only thing I could do: I wrote. I filled journals; I wrote scores of essays; I wrote poetry; I wrote short fiction and began to make notes for a novel about an assimilated postwar family in New England trying and failing to leave their tragic past behind. None of the pieces were published⁠—I didn’t submit any of them⁠—and it didn’t matter.”
― Elissa Altman, Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create

“Shame is permission's plasma.”
― Elissa Altman