Best 55 quotes of Patricia Hampl on MyQuotes

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.

Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.

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.

I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.

If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.

In description we hear and feel the absorption of the author in the material. We sense the presence of the creator of the scene. .. This personal absorption is what we mean by 'style.' It is strange that we would choose so oddly surfacey a word - style - for this most soulful aspect of writing. We could, perhaps more exactly, call this relation between consciousness and its subject 'integrity.' What else is the articulation of perception?

It is hard to sever the cords that tie us to our slavery and leave intact those that bind us to ourselves.

It's always a thrilling risk to say exactly what you mean, to express exactly what you see.

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.

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

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting mental health, relies heavily on memory and on the ability to retrieve and organize images and events from the personal pastIf we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us—to write the first draft and then return for the second draft—we are doing the work of memory.

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

Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.

poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.

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.

Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth; sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.

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.

Refuse to write your life and you have no life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

These days it seems the lyric impulse, so seemingly fragile, comes in for a lot of abuse-or simply a lot of mistrust. What's it for, anyway, in this hard-edged, worried world? Into this cultural uncertainty Gregory Orr's spirited meditation on the surprisingly tensile strength of poetry in the face of profound suffering and grief presents a welcome fresh view of the ancient human instinct to cry out and to praise.

Time, we like to say, cures all. But maybe the old saying doesn’t mean time heals. Time cures a secret in its brine, keeping it and finally, paradoxically, destroying it. Nothing is left in that salt solution but the pain or rage, the biting shame that lodged it there. Even they are diluted or denied.

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

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.

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.

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.

What is remembered is what becomes reality.

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.

Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.

But by the time you’ve worked long enough, hard enough, Real Life (which insists on being capitalized as if it were a personage with a proper name and a right to barge into this rental unit called your life) begins to reveal itself as something other than effort, other than accomplishment. Real Life wishes to be left to its own purposeless devices.

For the worker bee, life is given over to the grim satisfaction of striking a firm line through a task accomplished. On to the next, and the next. Check, check. Done and done. It explains—and solves—nothing to call this workaholism.

History, as it was purveyed to us, was not so much a narrative, not even the detached observation of the rise and fall of fortunes and cultures. It was the litany of loss, attended by the inevitable sympathy for the vanquished side. The past was always the underdog, and we sensed it was only right to be on its side against the bully future. We were left with the impression that our own grip was loosening on some essential pediment as one empire after another was swallowed up, and the centuries collapsed into our own.

I don’t understand what has happened. But that is has happened—that I know. It is a framed moment, not a story, but something much smaller, a spark of meaning I will return to all my life. The DNA of identity. What, much later, I learn is a vignette, a photo frayed at the edges, its old silver frame stowed in the dark attic of the mind.

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

Innocence is a temporary, maybe even an unreal, condition. Destined to die. Innocence lost is supposed to be experience gained, and therefore not a bad trade. "The fortunate fall" as Professor Youngblood taught us in Milton 3111. But what if innocence is never lost, never forfeited Then it can't rise to the edifying abstraction of 'experience.

I seem to be annoyed not only with Colette, but with the frame of mind I have inherited along with her—the postmodern pride of calling things by their names, the arrogance of assuming integrity is a matter of being more and more open. Or simply that a label, firmly affixed, is honesty in the face of euphemism and discretion.

Solitude provides the illusion—or is it the reality?—of a self. If I’m alone I can think dark thoughts, be real, be phony, try this, try that. Erase, contradict, forge ahead, double back.

Strange to think of a form of love going extinct, like a carrier pigeon, a rare tortoise, a lilac or apple whose seeds are not to be found anymore, the scent and taste of the thing long lost, never to be touched again.

. . . the final page of any novel is a destination, the creation of form offering the illusion of inevitability, the denial of chaos. We don’t love novels because they are like life, but because they are unlike it—deftly organized, filled with the satisfaction of shape.

The longing for solitude is a deeply romantic passion. But then writing is a romantic thing to do, predicated on desire, urgency, and an ideal of human connection, hardly available in what we wistfully call real life.

The rare innocence of my father never hardens into experience, into knowing what's what. He never achieves irony, the consolation prize for losing innocence and gaining experience. IT would be comic except that innocence is never comic when it is an article of faith.