In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.

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.

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.

We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.

Silence, that inspired dealer, takes the day's deck, the life, all in a crazy heap, lays it out, and plays its flawless hand of solitaire, every card in place. Scoops them up, and does it all over again.

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy.