Quote

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.

Patricia Hampl

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Patricia Hampl
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: March 12
Memoirist
Writer
St Paul
Minnesota
Sometimes
Celebration
Heart
Celebrate
Express
Work
Terrible
Something
Wonder
Amenable
Really
Artist
Resides
Social
Splendor
Art
Chaotic

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Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
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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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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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poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
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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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Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
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