Patricia Hampl Quotes

What is remembered is what becomes reality,

Planes are my foxhole. I'm always on my knees in them.

Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.

Refuse to write your life and you have no life.

I come from people who have always been polite enough to feel that nothing has ever happened to them.

Here, in memory, we live and die.

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

It is hard to sever the cords that tie us to our slavery and leave intact those that bind us to ourselves.

Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

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.

The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.

I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.

Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust ...

Looking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

You can't put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.

Fundamentally, [prayer] is a position, a placement of oneself.

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

It's always a thrilling risk to say exactly what you mean, to express exactly what you see.

People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal.

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.

Poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.

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.

The real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool.

In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.

True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world