You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.

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

No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.

Prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all that is.

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.

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

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