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.

It's always a thrilling risk to say exactly what you mean, to express exactly what you see.

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

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.

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 world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.

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