Patricia Hampl Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Pride, Winter, Night

  51 Copy quote

• People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.

  Patricia Hampl

  Dream, People, Immortal

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Expanding Universe, Mind, Wish

  14 Copy quote

• I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

  Patricia Hampl

  Writing, Order, Knows

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Spiritual, Memories, Writing

  11 Copy quote

• What is remembered is what becomes reality.

  Patricia Hampl

  Reality, Remembered

  9 Copy quote

• A careful first draft is a failed first draft

  Patricia Hampl

  Firsts, Careful

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Splendor, Celebration

  Patricia Hampl (1993). “Spillville: A Collaboration”, Milkweed Editions

  10 Copy quote

• Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow--or kneel or get knocked down--to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be.

  Patricia Hampl

  Book, Writing, Taste

  16 Copy quote

• The paradox: there can be no pilgrimage without a destination, but the destination is also not the real point of the endeavor. Not the destination, but the willingness to wander in pursuit characterizes pilgrimage. Willingness: to hear the tales along the way, to make the casual choices of travel, to acquiesce even to boredom. That's pilgrimage -- a mind full of journey.

  Patricia Hampl

  Real, Journey, Boredom

  Patricia Hampl (1993). “Spillville: A Collaboration”, Milkweed Editions

  38 Copy quote

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

  Patricia Hampl

  Memories, Past, Phenomenon

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Stories, Burden

  9 Copy quote

• Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

  Patricia Hampl

  Taste, Acquired Taste, Oneself

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Prayer, Focus, Attention

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Light, Substance, Golden

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Writing, Long

  8 Copy quote

• Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.

  Patricia Hampl

  Humble, Night, Knitting

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Crazy, Hands, Play

  Patricia Hampl (1993). “Virgin Time”

  7 Copy quote

• Memoirists wish to tell their mind, not their story.

  Patricia Hampl

  Mind, Wish, Stories

  4 Copy quote

• Refuse to write your life and you have no life.

  Patricia Hampl

  Writing, Refuse

  4 Copy quote

• True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world

  Patricia Hampl

  Self, Literature, World

  8 Copy quote

• The real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool.

  Patricia Hampl

  Real, Self, Tools

  4 Copy quote

• The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.

  Patricia Hampl

  Secret, World, Mystery

  4 Copy quote

• Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.

  Patricia Hampl

  Writing, Soul, Persons

  7 Copy quote

• Here, in memory, we live and die.

  Patricia Hampl

  Memories, Dies

  6 Copy quote

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