What is remembered is what becomes reality.

The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy.

Refuse to write your life and you have no life.

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

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

In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.