Patricia Hampl Famous Quotes
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Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.
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.
To speak, to write , without charm is to make utterances without reference to a reality outside oneself. It is an act devoid of the playfulness of art, without the attractive humility of one who know absolutely that others exist and therefore feels drawn to please them, because to give them an instant of pleasure is to acknowledge their existence.
In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.
For moderns - for us - there is something illicit, it seems, about wasted time, the empty hours of contemplation when a thought unfurls, figures of speech budding and blossoming, articulation drifting like spent petals onto the dark table we all once gathered around to talk and talk, letting time get the better of us. _Just taking our time_, as we say. That is, letting time take us.
"Can you say," I once inquired of a sixty-year old cloistered nun who had lived (vibrantly, it seemed) from teh age of nineteen in her monastery cell, "what the core of contemplative life is?"
"Leisure," she said, without hesitation, her china blue eyes cheerfully steady on me. I suppose I expected her to say, "Prayer." Or maybe "The search for God." Or "Inner peace." Inner peace would have been good. One of the big-ticket items of spirituality.
She saw I didn't see.
"It takes time to do this," she said finally.
Her "this" being the kind of work that requires abdication from time's industrial purpose (doing things, getting things). By choosing leisure she had bid farewell to the fevered enterprise of getting-and-spending whereby, as the poet said, we lay waste our powers.
I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
Here, in memory, we live and die.
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.
Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.
But by the time you've worked long enough, hard enough, Real Life (which insists on being capitalized as if it were a personage with a proper name and a right to barge into this rental unit called your life) begins to reveal itself as something other than effort, other than accomplishment. Real Life wishes to be left to its own purposeless devices.
Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.
Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth; sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.
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.
Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.
It's always a thrilling risk to say exactly what you mean, to express exactly what you see.
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.
The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.
We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something
make something
with it. A story, we sense is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.
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.
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.
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?
We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us ... we are doing the work of memory.
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.
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.
I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.
If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.
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.
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.
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.
The real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool.
What is remembered is what becomes reality,
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.
History, as it was purveyed to us, was not so much a narrative, not even the detached observation of the rise and fall of fortunes and cultures. It was the litany of loss, attended by the inevitable sympathy for the vanquished side. The past was always the underdog, and we sensed it was only right to be on its side against the bully future. We were left with the impression that our own grip was loosening on some essential pediment as one empire after another was swallowed up, and the centuries collapsed into our own.
A careful first draft is a failed first draft
You can't put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.
It is hard to sever the cords that tie us to our slavery and leave intact those that bind us to ourselves.
Poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.