Patricia Hampl - I Could Tell You Stories (1999)

4 Sourced Quotes

View all Patricia Hampl Quotes

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

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

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

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