The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoir that fits us all.

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

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 itself. That includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and thought ... Memoirists wish to tell their mind. Not their story.

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.

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

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

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 fell, so that winter seemed to partake of religion in a way no other season did, hushed, solemn.