Refuse to write your life and you have no life.

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 essential parts.

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 hard-edged, worried world? Into this cultural uncertainty Gregory Orr's spirited meditation on the surprisingly tensile strength of poetry in the face of profound suffering and grief presents a welcome fresh view of the ancient human instinct to cry out and to praise.

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

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, where the real mystery of intelligence - intuition - rather than thought lay catlike and feminine, ready to pounce.

It's always a thrilling risk to say exactly what you mean, to express exactly what you see.

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