Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself..

French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a rummage sale, rusty and missing a lot of essent….

People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal..

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..

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

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

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….

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste..

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

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….

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 ….

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 ….

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….

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

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

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….

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

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

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

Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust..

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