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Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.

Patricia Hampl

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Patricia Hampl
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: March 12
Memoirist
Writer
St Paul
Minnesota
Life
Phenomenon
Necessarily
Memory
Memories
Looking
Rather
Past
Repeatedly
Become
Fascinated

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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.
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Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
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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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poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
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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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Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
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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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I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
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Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
Patricia Hampl
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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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