“Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection; to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.”

“My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike. She said little, especially when my father or the men who worked for him were about I remember her instinctive and unhesitating sympathy for the miners.”

“Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection; to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.”

“In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament.”