Time, we like to say, cures all. But maybe the old saying doesn’t mean time heals. Time cures a secret in its brine, keeping it and finally, paradoxically, destroying it. Nothing is left in that salt solution but the pain or rage, the biting shame that lodged it there. Even they are diluted or denied.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

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

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.

Prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all that is.

Here, in memory, we live and die.

Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting mental health, relies heavily on memory and on the ability to retrieve and organize images and events from the personal pastIf we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us—to write the first draft and then return for the second draft—we are doing the work of memory.