Quote

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

Patricia Hampl

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Patricia Hampl
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: March 12
Memoirist
Writer
St Paul
Minnesota
Trying
Much
Things
Betray
Civil
Paper
Secret
Keep
Self

More quotes by Patricia Hampl

Image
Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
Patricia Hampl
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.
Patricia Hampl
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
Patricia Hampl
Image
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
Image
Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
Patricia Hampl
Image
I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.
Patricia Hampl
Image
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
Image
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
Image
poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
Patricia Hampl
Image
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
Image
No memoirists 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
Image
In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.
Patricia Hampl
Image
I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
Patricia Hampl
Image
The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.
Patricia Hampl
Image
Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.
Patricia Hampl