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.

What is remembered is what becomes reality.

The paradox: there can be no pilgrimage without a destination, but the destination is also not the real point of the endeavor. Not the destination, but the willingness to wander in pursuit characterizes pilgrimage. Willingness: to hear the tales along the way, to make the casual choices of travel, to acquiesce even to boredom. That's pilgrimage -- a mind full of journey.

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.

I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.

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

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.