Quote

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

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Patricia Hampl
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: March 12
Memoirist
Writer
St Paul
Minnesota
Life
Crazy
Dealer
Takes
Deck
Hand
Card
Place
Plays
Hands
Cards
Scoops
Doe
Lays
Solitaire
Play
Inspired
Flawless
Every
Silence
Heap

More quotes by Patricia Hampl

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poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
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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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The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.
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Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
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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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Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
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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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Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
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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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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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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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I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.
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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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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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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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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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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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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