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Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.

Patricia Hampl

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Patricia Hampl
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: March 12
Memoirist
Writer
St Paul
Minnesota
Wealth
Passion
Engender
Didn
Beget
Might
Begets
Sometimes
Decency
Envy
Necessarily
Poverty

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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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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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I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.
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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 world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.
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Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
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Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.
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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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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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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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Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.
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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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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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poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.
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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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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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Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
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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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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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