French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a rummage sale, rusty and missing a lot of essential parts.

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.

We have nothing that is really our own

To me, re-reading my favorite books is like spending time with my best friends.I’d never be satisfied to limit myself to just one experience each with my favorite people.

Problems are meant to be solved, but unfortunately, a lot of people choose to complain, worry, and cry about them.

Respect the colony as an organism rather than a mechanism with interchangeable parts.

Mary, ' said her mother. 'We don't like sarcasm ' 'You mightn't like it, ' said Mary. 'But I love it.

All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.

Twenty generations ago - around the year 1390 - you had 1 048 576 ancestors. In the 21st generation of your family that number will double again.

Faith is personal if it's to be real.

Most people don't plan to fail, they fail to plan.

One runs a business ultimately to do well so you can do good for everyone.