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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

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Patricia Hampl
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: March 12
Memoirist
Writer
St Paul
Minnesota
Highest
Chilly
Heart
Pondering
Kind
Ready
Vocation
Mind
Special
Feminine
Thinking
Rather
Intuition
Place
Lays
Thought
Intelligence
Done
Mystery
Pounce
Real

More quotes by Patricia Hampl

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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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Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.
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In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.
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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 don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
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Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.
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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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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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Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.
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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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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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