The real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool.

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.

Only those who spend long times with themselves can touch the depths of life!

Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.

The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances.

A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port, together with some of the surrounding territory.

A time comes when you need to stop waiting for the man you want to become and start being the man you want to be.

Jason: I'm all for hobbies, but you think this is the time for origami? Whatcha making, a crane?

God has no forms, no limbs, no qualities, no preferences, no prejudices.

The benefits of knowledge can only be realized in practice.

You can support the troops but not the president.

Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.