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.

A peculiarity of the American historical sensibility allows us to be proud of great-grandfathers (or even grandfathers) who lived in crushing poverty, while the poverty of a father is too close for comfort.

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

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.