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

Patricia Hampl

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Patricia Hampl
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: March 12
Memoirist
Writer
St Paul
Minnesota
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More quotes by Patricia Hampl

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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.
Patricia Hampl
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poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
Patricia Hampl
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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.
Patricia Hampl
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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.
Patricia Hampl
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Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.
Patricia Hampl
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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.
Patricia Hampl
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I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.
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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Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
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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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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In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.
Patricia Hampl
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The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.
Patricia Hampl
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Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
Patricia Hampl
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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.
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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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
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Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
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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Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.
Patricia Hampl