Patricia Hampl Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Patricia Hampl quote about:
- Consciousness,
- Literature,
- Memoir,
- Memories,
- Past,
- Poetry,
- Prayer,
- Writing,
-
“Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“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 -
“I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“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 -
“True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“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 -
“I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“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 -
“I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“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 -
“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 -
“silence was the first prayer I learned to trust ...”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“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 -
“It is hard to sever the cords that tie us to our slavery and leave intact those that bind us to ourselves.”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“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?”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“It's always a thrilling risk to say exactly what you mean, to express exactly what you see.”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“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 -
“Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth; sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.”
-- Patricia Hampl -
“Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.”
-- Patricia Hampl
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