Patricia Hampl Quotes

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

In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates. ~ Patricia Hampl

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

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste. ~ Patricia Hampl

What is remembered is what becomes reality, ~ 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

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art; Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, eds., Modern American Memoirs; Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Phillip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay; Jane Taylor McDonnell, Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir; and William Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. ~ Vivian Gornick

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

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. ~ Patricia Hampl

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. ~ Patricia Hampl

Poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception. ~ Patricia Hampl

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. ~ Patricia Hampl

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. ~ Patricia Hampl

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

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. ~ Patricia Hampl

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. ~ Patricia Hampl

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. ~ Patricia Hampl

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. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them. ~ 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 could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell. ~ Patricia Hampl

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? ~ Patricia Hampl

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. ~ 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

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

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

Here, in memory, we live and die. ~ Patricia Hampl

A careful first draft is a failed first draft ~ Patricia Hampl

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. ~ 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

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. ~ Patricia Hampl

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

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

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

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

a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing when you're cocky. ~ Patricia Cornwell

Each person carries around in himself a terrible other world of hell and the unknown. It is an enormous pit reaching below the deepest crater of the earth, or it is the thinnest air far beyond the moon. But it is frightening and essentially "unlike" man as he knows himself familiarly, so we spend all our days living at the other antipodes of ourself. ~ Patricia Highsmith

Seriously, if you really, truly don't understand basic terminology (which was at least half my problem with the adult-level "beginner" books), the children's section is the place to go. ~ Patricia C. Wrede

If you look hard enough, chaos turns into order the way letters turn into words. ~ Patricia McCormick

It's easier to dismiss ghosts in the daylight. ~ Patricia Briggs

She was a little bit of a thing with a light untidy fluff of hair and a nose which went pink in moments of emotion. It was pink now and it quivered. She dabbed aimlessly at her hair and three of the remaining pins fell out. William stooped to pick them up, and wished he hadn't. He said he thought he would go to bed, and went. ~ Patricia Wentworth

on his lips. He's in jeans and loafers, a Red Sox windbreaker ~ Patricia Cornwell

Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Marriage is not as necessary for survival of the species as it used to be, and it has suffered somewhat from the change. ~ Patricia Briggs

You're a dead man," Kyle said. "Warren doesn't take kindly to people who hurt me. ~ Patricia Briggs

Some people are like Slinkies. They aren't really good for anything, but they still bring a smile to my face when I push them down a flight of stairs. ~ Patricia Briggs

The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated. ~ Patricia Duncker

If you want to build a car, you don't slap a bunch of iron ore, some sand, a rubber tree, and a couple of cows together and call it good ~ Patricia C. Wrede

We require to get out of our own built up Cocoons, these need to be worn, softened and freed through. ~ Patricia Dsouza

We're seeing quite a lot of people who really would like a return to class-based politics. ~ Patricia Hewitt

Accept yourself as you are, by recognizing that you will not continue to remain this way forever ~ Patricia Dsouza

News of Daniel's disappearance does not alarm me as it might have done a week ago. Given recent events, very little alarms me as it might have done a week ago. I feel as if my supply of alarm has been exhausted, at least temporarily. ~ Patricia C. Wrede

Moreover, it is so important that people have the opportunity to share their stories and have them documented. There have been large-scale oral history projects after many events, from September 11th to Hurricane Katrina. Many oral history projects are much more confined, but equally valuable. We can learn about different working conditions, living conditions, trauma experiences and much more through oral history. ~ Patricia Leavy

When they begin to feel that others don't love them, they already consider their worth and consider that they are not worth living at all. ~ Patricia Dsouza

Unless you're a salesman, or a bad guest on a talk show, you don't call someone by his name that often. ~ Patricia Marx

A lie that is half a truth is ever the hardest to fight. ~ Patricia Wentworth

The world that spun from the web of her imagination was manifestly more real to [Patricia Highsmith] than what she saw before her. It was as if, like her fiction, she inhabited a paraxial region, and area which, like one of the working titles for Strangers on a Train, could be said to lie at 'The Other Side of the Mirror'. ~ Andrew Wilson

Anna followed, keeping a sharp eye out for things he might back into or over. She wondered if Isaac did this all the time-and, if so, how he avoided getting photos in the paper with captions like "Local Alpha Trips Over Child" or "Wolf Versus Street Sign, Street Sign Wins. ~ Patricia Briggs

I don't want to go slumming in somebody else's pain just to write a book. I want to go into those darker places to shine a light on that experience and come out with a story that validates the human spirit. ~ Patricia McCormick

Winter was usually the slow season at the menagerie, with so many of the animals hibernating, but that year I was busier than a hen with a double set of chicks. ~ Patricia C. Wrede

God is love, and when we pray we are drawing near to love, and all our hatred must melt away like the snow melts when the sun shines on it in spring. Leave Lucien to God, Annette. He rewards both good and evil, but remember, He loves Lucien just the same as He loves Dani. ~ Patricia St. John

Brains are not magical; they are causal machines. ~ Patricia Churchland

This is what I like, sitting at a table and watching people go by. It does something to your outlook on life. The Anglo-Saxons make a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table. ~ Patricia Highsmith

That man would betray his own shadow. And for what? A child's tale.'
'Is it?' Mag looked at her. 'Is it only a tale?'
For a moment, the purple eyes grew dark, black as the little rags of shadows that Mag saw on empty streets or patches of barren ground, attached to nothing, seemingly blown at random from some place adrift in light. ~ Patricia A. McKillip

I keep forgetting that you're not as empty headed as most princesses. ~ Patricia C. Wrede

It doesn't matter that nobody sees your face or knows your name, my wide eyed child, my father said to me. You know it. You be it.
You are. ~ Patricia Raybon

Just what did happen to a corpse under water for four, five years, even three? the tarpaulin or canvas would rot, perhaps more than half of it would disappear; the stones would likely have fallen out, therefore, enabling the corpse to drift more easily, even rise a little, provided any flesh was left. But wasn't rising due to bloating? Tom thought of the word maceration, the flaking off in layers of the outer skin. Then what? The nibbling of fish? Or wouldn't the current have removed pieces of flesh until nothing but bones were left? The bloated period must be long past ... ~ Patricia Highsmith

I don't do things that are illegal. ~ Patricia Cornwell

Being serious just makes me a little bit embarrassed. ~ Patricia Marx