The successful memoirist [blogger] respects facts, uses them accurately, rigorously represses the human impulse to lie or embellish, but knows that truth is both different from facts and greater than facts, and not always their sum.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the distinction between truth and facts in storytelling, encouraging authenticity while respecting reality.
Bill Roorbach's quote reflects the complex nature of memoir writing, suggesting that while factual accuracy is essential, the essence of truth goes beyond mere facts. It highlights the memoirist's responsibility to present their experiences honestly, acknowledging that personal truth can sometimes diverge from objective reality, thus enriching the narrative's depth and authenticity.
In practice
During a writing workshop, the quote can be used to emphasize the importance of authenticity in personal narratives.
Superstitions, bigotries, hypocrisies, prejudices, these phantoms, phantoms though they be, cling to life; they have teeth and nails in their shadowy substance, and we must grapple with them individually and make war on them without truce; for it is one of humanity's inevitabilities to be condemned to eternal struggle with phantoms.
Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end. The exclusivism of there being only one way in which we can be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in sole possession of the truth—that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.
When I look back on what I did for the Left, I'm in a small way quite proud of some of it - I only wish I'd done more.
We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.
If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.
I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don't say what it wants to hear.
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