Occupation: Memoirist Birth: March 12, 1946
Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste..
The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another..
Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person..
Time, we like to say, cures all. But maybe the old saying doesn’t mean time heals. Time cures a secret in its brine, keeping it and finally, paradoxi….
Writing about why you write is a funny business, like scratching what doesn't itch. Impulses are mysterious, and explaining them must be done with mi….
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….
Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting ….
The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another….
The paradox: there can be no pilgrimage without a destination, but the destination is also not the real point of the endeavor. Not the destination, b….
Pondering was the highest vocation... Pondering was a special kind of thinking. It was not done in the mind, that chilly place, but in the heart, whe….
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..
Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust..
Refuse to write your life and you have no life..
Memory is, first, a captivating mystery..
Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them..
If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most ….
Prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all that is..
A peculiarity of the American historical sensibility allows us to be proud of great-grandfathers (or even grandfathers) who lived in crushing poverty….
In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates..
I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell..
Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the sta….