Top 43 Patricia Hampl Quotes
#1. I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
Patricia Hampl
#2. The cold was our pride, the snow was our beauty. It fell and fell, lacing day and night together in a milky haze, making everything quieter as it fell, so that winter seemed to partake of religion in a way no other season did, hushed, solemn.
Patricia Hampl
#3. A peculiarity of the American historical sensibility allows us to be proud of great-grandfathers (or even grandfathers) who lived in crushing poverty, while the poverty of a father is too close for comfort.
Patricia Hampl
#4. Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to 'tell a story.' They want to tell it all - the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself. That includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and thought ... Memoirists wish to tell their mind. Not their story.
Patricia Hampl
#5. 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.
Patricia Hampl
#7. Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth; sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.
Patricia Hampl
#9. Silence, that inspired dealer, takes the day's deck, the life, all in a crazy heap, lays it out, and plays its flawless hand of solitaire, every card in place. Scoops them up, and does it all over again.
Patricia Hampl
#10. 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.
Patricia Hampl
#11. The artist's work, it is sometimes said, is to celebrate. But really that is not so; it is to express wonder. And something terrible resides at the heart of wonder. Celebration is social, amenable. Wonder has a chaotic splendor.
Patricia Hampl
#12. 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.
Patricia Hampl
#13. Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
Patricia Hampl
#14. We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something
make something
with it. A story, we sense is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.
Patricia Hampl
#15. We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us ... we are doing the work of memory.
Patricia Hampl
#16. Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.
Patricia Hampl
#17. People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.
Patricia Hampl
#18. The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoir that fits us all.
Patricia Hampl
#19. I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.
Patricia Hampl
#20. I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.
Patricia Hampl
#21. The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.
Patricia Hampl
#22. Writing about why you write is a funny business, like scratching what doesn't itch. Impulses are mysterious, and explaining them must be done with mirrors, like certain cunning slight-of-hand routines.
Patricia Hampl
#24. True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world
Patricia Hampl
#25. Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
Patricia Hampl
#26. 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.
Patricia Hampl
#27. You can't put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.
Patricia Hampl
#30. 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.
Patricia Hampl
#32. Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.
Patricia Hampl
#33. Pondering was the highest vocation ... Pondering was a special kind of thinking. It was not done in the mind, that chilly place, but in the heart, where the real mystery of intelligence - intuition - rather than thought lay catlike and feminine, ready to pounce.
Patricia Hampl
#34. Landscape, that vast still life, invites description, not narration. It is lyric. It has no story: it is the beloved, and asks only to be contemplated.
Patricia Hampl
#35. I waste my life. I want to. It's the thing to do with a life. We were wrong about work
it isn't the best thing, no matter how much you love it. Wasting time is better.
Patricia Hampl
#36. The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy.
Patricia Hampl
#37. Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust ...
Patricia Hampl
#38. The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.
Patricia Hampl
#39. It is hard to sever the cords that tie us to our slavery and leave intact those that bind us to ourselves.
Patricia Hampl
#40. In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.
Patricia Hampl
#41. The real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool.
Patricia Hampl
#42. Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.
Patricia Hampl
#43. It's always a thrilling risk to say exactly what you mean, to express exactly what you see.
Patricia Hampl
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