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
Play
Inspired
Flawless
Every
Silence
Heap
Life
Crazy
Dealer
Takes
Deck
Hand
Card
Place
Plays
Hands
Cards
Scoops
Doe
Lays
Solitaire

More quotes by Patricia Hampl

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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 was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.
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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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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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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.
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Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
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poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
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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 could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.
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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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In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.
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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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Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
Patricia Hampl
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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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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 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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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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People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.
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