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.

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.

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.

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

By justifying our harmful negative habits, we live in delusion. We are lying to ourselves. And worse yet, we waste the precious opportunity of living our truth.

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

I'm not sure that I am able to feel embarrassment.

I'm not running for state Senate because I wanted to become a politician. I'm running because I wanted to serve.

I don't give parties, and I'm not in that social scene. I couldn't care less.

What happened down in the dungeons between you and Professor Quirrell is a complete secret, so, naturally the whole school knows.

when you fall in love, you must fall in love with a man the way he is now, because marriage won't change anything, except maybe your tax deduction.

You're an entropic chaos factor

Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.

A racist is a man who believes in history, genetics, and his eyes!