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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.

Patricia Hampl

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Patricia Hampl
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: March 12
Memoirist
Writer
St Paul
Minnesota
Close
Crushing
Poverty
Sensibility
Proud
Grandfather
American
Crush
Father
Allows
Great
Historical
Even
Comfort
Peculiarity
Lived
Grandfathers

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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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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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In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.
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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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Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
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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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poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
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Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
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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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