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

More quotes by Patricia Hampl

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Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
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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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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 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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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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I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.
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.
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Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.
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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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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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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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poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
Patricia Hampl
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Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
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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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Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
Patricia Hampl
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In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.
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.
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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Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.
Patricia Hampl