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
Something
Terrible
Really
Wonder
Amenable
Artist
Resides
Social
Splendor
Art
Chaotic
Sometimes
Celebration
Heart
Celebrate
Work
Express

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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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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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Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
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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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In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.
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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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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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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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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 don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
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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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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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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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I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.
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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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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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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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