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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
Done
Mirrors
Itch
Must
Hand
Routines
Writing
Funny
Impulses
Like
Business
Slight
Write
Cunning
Doesn
Explaining
Hands
Impulse
Certain
Mysterious
Scratching

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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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Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.
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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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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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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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Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
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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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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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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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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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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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Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.
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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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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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I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
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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.
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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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Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.
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