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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
Must
Witnessing
Something
Burden
Make
Simply
Possible
Story
Experience
Sense
Habitation
Stories
Entrusted

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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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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Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
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Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
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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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I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.
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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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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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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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Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.
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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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Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
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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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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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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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The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.
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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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Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.
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poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
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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