Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Patricia Hampl

Image
I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.
Patricia Hampl
Image
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.
Patricia Hampl
Image
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
Image
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.
Patricia Hampl
Image
poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
Patricia Hampl
Image
I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.
Patricia Hampl
Image
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.
Patricia Hampl
Image
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.
Patricia Hampl
Image
Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.
Patricia Hampl
Image
Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
Patricia Hampl
Image
People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.
Patricia Hampl
Image
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
Image
Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
Patricia Hampl
Image
Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.
Patricia Hampl
Image
The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.
Patricia Hampl
Image
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.
Patricia Hampl
Image
Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.
Patricia Hampl
Image
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.
Patricia Hampl
Image
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.
Patricia Hampl
Image
I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
Patricia Hampl