Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

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.

The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.

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.

Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.

Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth; sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.