The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.

I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.

My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldnt understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer.

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

I learned enough Hebrew to stagger through a meaningless ceremony that I scarcely remember.

When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.

I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand.