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

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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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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.
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poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
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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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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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I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.
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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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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 don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
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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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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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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 come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.
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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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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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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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Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.
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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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Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
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