Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.

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.

There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.

Everybody has something, that one thing they must do to feel happy. I think this is yours, and I want you to be happy. You don’t have to do it, but it’s here if you choose to come back to it.

She brushed the tears from their faces and sang them a melancholy lullaby. Her obvious devotion to her daughters pulled at my heart strings, making my chest ache with longing for my own mother.

When your ship comes in, don't be in the bathroom with your pants around your ankles." quoted by Frank McNichols, father of Rose McNichols in A Nose for Hanky Panky, a Granite Cove Mystery

Good listeners, like precious gems, are to be treasured.

All holidays can be good times.

I'm not an awards-driven person in anything. Anytime you do get caught up in that, you usually end up getting whacked.

I've always done pretty well in auditions. I just go in and give it my best shot.

Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.

It doesn’t matter how much you love someone, you are never going to be what that person wants you to be.