Quote

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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Patricia Hampl
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: March 12
Memoirist
Writer
St Paul
Minnesota
Religion
Season
Hushed
Making
Snow
Quieter
Night
Seasons
Milky
Together
Winter
Partake
Everything
Seemed
Haze
Way
Pride
January
Cold
Solemn
Beauty
Fell

More quotes by 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.
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Pondering was the highest vocation... Pondering was a special kind of thinking. It was not done in the mind, that chilly place, but in the heart, where the real mystery of intelligence - intuition - rather than thought lay catlike and feminine, ready to pounce.
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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.
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Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.
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People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.
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poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
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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.
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The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.
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I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.
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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.
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Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
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Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.
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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.
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Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
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You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.
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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.
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I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
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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.
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Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
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I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.
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