Top 44 Patricia Hampl Quotes

#1. It still comes as a shock to realize that I don't write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know. - PATRICIA HAMPL If

Lynn Lauber

Patricia Hampl Quotes #677924
#2. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1484831
#3. Here, in memory, we live and die.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1047506
#4. True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1092052
#5. Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1151705
#6. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1205158
#7. You can't put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1211464
#8. What is remembered is what becomes reality,

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1238055
#9. Poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1249881
#10. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1385931
#11. A careful first draft is a failed first draft

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1431928
#12. Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1447777
#13. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #964322
#14. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1529447
#15. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1573460
#16. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1588380
#17. Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust ...

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1674997
#18. The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1707876
#19. It is hard to sever the cords that tie us to our slavery and leave intact those that bind us to ourselves.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1714512
#20. In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1754568
#21. The real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1776396
#22. Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1781599
#23. It's always a thrilling risk to say exactly what you mean, to express exactly what you see.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #1785652
#24. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #344168
#25. I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #13138
#26. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #25869
#27. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #34218
#28. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #131985
#29. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #159627
#30. Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #220676
#31. Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth; sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #252236
#32. Refuse to write your life and you have no life.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #308205
#33. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #311844
#34. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #322890
#35. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #955338
#36. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #351550
#37. Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #366427
#38. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #434237
#39. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #474754
#40. Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #568364
#41. People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #633046
#42. 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

Patricia Hampl Quotes #742491
#43. I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #889459
#44. I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.

Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Quotes #891553

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