Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust..

The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave….

It is hard to sever the cords that tie us to our slavery and leave intact those that bind us to ourselves..

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste..

Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow--or kneel or get knocked down--to the fact that you are going to write ….

The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoi….

You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil..

I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them..

The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another….

The real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool..

These days it seems the lyric impulse, so seemingly fragile, comes in for a lot of abuse-or simply a lot of mistrust. What's it for, anyway, in this ….

Silence, that inspired dealer, takes the day's deck, the life, all in a crazy heap, lays it out, and plays its flawless hand of solitaire, every card….

No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, ju….

True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world.

Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to 'tell a story.' They want to tell it all - the all of personal experience, of consciousness….

landscape, that vast still life, invites description, not narration. It is lyric. It has no story: it is the beloved, and asks only to be contemplate….

The cold was our pride, the snow was our beauty. It fell and fell, lacing day and night together in a milky haze, making everything quieter as it f….

We store in memory only images of value. The value may be lost over the passage of time, but that's the implacable judgment of feeling..

We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something--make something--with it. A story, we sense is the only ….

Refuse to write your life and you have no life..

Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting ….