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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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Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.
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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 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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Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
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Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
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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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Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in 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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Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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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 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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