We store in memory only images of value. The value may be lost over the passage of time, but that's the implacable judgment of feeling.

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.

It was the women of afghanistan, my mother believed, who-once they’d been granted access to books and education- would be the salvation of the country

The true mark of English conversation is not being able to tell when you've been insulted. I think the more sophisticated society becomes, the more it hides behind the masks it manufactures.

Yes, ” Bernarde quipped, “Deal with me, Jean Luc. Come and dance with the night, brother. Let us battle ‘till the sun turns us to ash.

Busy people are never busybodies.

I have a philosophy, a belief, which I can see in many, many other directors that your early work is your best work, because you don't know what you're doing.

It's impossible to compete with the dead. I wished I could stop trying.

I have never been able to soothe myself with the sugary delusions of religion; for these things stand convicted of the utmost absurdity in light of modern scientific knowledge.

I'm a lot easier to work with now than I have been in the past, for sure.

Guilt is a gift from Allah warning you that what you are doing is violating your soul

If you are going to have a risk-taking culture, you can't really look at every failure as a failure, you've got to be able to look at the failure as a learning opportunity.