The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoir that fits us all.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.

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.

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.

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.

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.

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

Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

RUIN, v. To destroy. Specifically, to destroy a maid's belief in the virtue of maids.

To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.

If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

Papa, please get the moon for me.

I think as a culture, we don't like conflict or looking at icky stuff - especially in our downtime.

We forget that God's primary goal is not changing our situations or relationships so that we can be happy, but changing us through our situations and relationships so that we will be holy.

A man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf, which grows in water but is never moistened by water; so a man ought to live in the world - his heart to God and his hands to work.

It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

There is in this world no such force as the force of a person determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.

Everything, I just wanted to be like my father. And, as I grew within the music, I kind of became myself which was even more like my father, only without me trying though.