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.

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

Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.

French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a rummage sale, rusty and missing a lot of essential parts.

True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world

Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to 'tell a story.' They want to tell it all - the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself. That includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and thought ... Memoirists wish to tell their mind. Not their story.

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.