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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.

Patricia Hampl

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Patricia Hampl
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: March 12
Memoirist
Writer
St Paul
Minnesota
Must
Hand
Routines
Writing
Funny
Impulses
Like
Business
Slight
Write
Cunning
Doesn
Explaining
Hands
Impulse
Certain
Mysterious
Scratching
Done
Mirrors
Itch

More quotes by Patricia Hampl

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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.
Patricia Hampl
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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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Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
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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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Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.
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Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.
Patricia Hampl
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Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
Patricia Hampl
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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.
Patricia Hampl
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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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The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.
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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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poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
Patricia Hampl
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I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.
Patricia Hampl
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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.
Patricia Hampl
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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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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.
Patricia Hampl
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In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.
Patricia Hampl
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Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.
Patricia Hampl
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I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
Patricia Hampl
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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.
Patricia Hampl