Patricia Hampl Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

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

Patricia Hampl
We store in memory only images of value. The value may be lost over time... but that's the implacable judgment of feeling: This, we say somewhere within is, is something I'm hanging on to.

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

Patricia Hampl
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
In the '70s Prague was pewter gray in spirit, broken and oddly adrift in the middle of Europe. The most golden thing about it then was its silence. Loneliness was its chief allure, radiating a sullen romance bred of cigarette smoke and satire.

Patricia Hampl
Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust...

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
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
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
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
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
There is a certain silence which is language,
It swells, keeps time, like music, like passion.

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
No memoirist 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
Summer, shrewd doctor, treats the eye before all else,
sends in the season's tray of soft foods, pollen and rose.

Patricia Hampl
There is so much evil
but none of us knows an evil person.

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

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

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

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

Patricia Hampl
At a sidewalk table outside a crummy café facing the station, I gulped down a patch of lasagna. It was clammy-cold and looked like something that should be bandaged.

Patricia Hampl