Patricia Hampl Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

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

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

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.

What is remembered is what becomes reality.

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

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

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

Here, in memory, we live and die.

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.

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

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

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.

poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.

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 could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.

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.

Refuse to write your life and you have no life.

In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.

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

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

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

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.

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

Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.

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

Memoirists wish to tell their mind, not their story.

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

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