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.

I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.

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.

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

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.