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Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.
Patricia Hampl
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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
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There is so much evil
but none of us knows an evil person.
Patricia Hampl
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The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.
Patricia Hampl
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Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth; sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.
Patricia Hampl
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Summer, shrewd doctor, treats the eye before all else,
sends in the season's tray of soft foods, pollen and rose.
Patricia Hampl
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.
Patricia Hampl
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Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
Patricia Hampl
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It is hard to sever the cords that tie us to our slavery and leave intact those that bind us to ourselves.
Patricia Hampl
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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
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Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust...
Patricia Hampl
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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.
Patricia Hampl
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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
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I struck the usual bargain, paying for flattery by calling it insight.
Patricia Hampl
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[They] hunted mushrooms with Moravian cunning and passion.
Patricia Hampl
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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
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Writing was the soul of everything else.... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.
Patricia Hampl
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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
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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
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Quote of the day
Joy is like restless day; but peace divine Like quiet night; Lead me, O Lord, — till perfect Day shall shine Through Peace to Light.
Adelaide Anne Procter
Patricia Hampl
Born:
March 12, 1946
(age 78)
Bio:
Patricia Hampl is an American memoirist, writer, lecturer, and educator. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and is one of the founding members of the Loft Literary Center.
Known for:
The Florist's Daughter (2007)
A romantic education (1981)
Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime (2006)
I Could Tell You Stories (1999)
Virgin Time (1992)
Most used words:
memory
silence
story
life
poverty
fell
passion
wonder
time
write
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