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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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Patricia Hampl
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: March 12
Memoirist
Writer
St Paul
Minnesota
Story
Experience
Sense
Habitation
Stories
Entrusted
Must
Witnessing
Something
Burden
Make
Simply
Possible

More quotes by Patricia Hampl

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Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
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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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I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.
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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 don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
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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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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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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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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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Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
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Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
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Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.
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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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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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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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I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.
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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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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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Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.
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