500 Words says it all
You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.”
Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, "The Site of Memory" in Inventing the Truth
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Joan Didion
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Every man has within him the entire human condition.
Michel de Montaigne
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As a young person it’s important to scrutinize the plot you’ve internalized and find out whether it accurately represents what you want to be, because we tend to act out those life plots unless we think about them.
Jill Ker Conway, "Points of Departure," in Inventing the Truth
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[T]he imagination is founded in, flourishes on, images: pictures fortified by sight, touch, taste, sound, and passionate emotion.
Andrea Barrett, "The Sea of Information" in The Best American Essays 2005
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The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom. Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue--a friendship, if you will, based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship.
Phillip Lopate, introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay
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Even the most artfully composed essay suggests a naturalness of discourse. As our precursor Montaigne advised, "We must remove the mask." [....] My preference was always to essays that, springing from intense personal experience, are nonetheless significantly linked to larger issues.
Joyce Carol Oates, introduction to The Best American Essays of the Century
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My advice to memoir writers is to embark upon a memoir for the same reason that you would embark on any other book: to fashion a text. Don’t hope in a memoir to preserve your memories. [....] You can't put together a memoir without cannibalizing your own life for parts. The work battens on your memories. And it replaces them.
Annie Dillard, "To Fashion a Text," in Inventing the Truth