I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell. — Patricia Hampl Copy Share Image
I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know. — Patricia Hampl Copy Share Image
Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy. — Patricia Hampl Copy Share Image
True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world — Patricia Hampl Copy Share Image
The real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool. — Patricia Hampl Copy Share Image
Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person. — Patricia Hampl Copy Share Image
Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to 'tell a story.' They want to tell it all - the all of… — Patricia Hampl Copy Share Image
Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow--or kneel or get knocked down--to the… — Patricia Hampl Copy Share Image
Writing about why you write is a funny business, like scratching what doesn't itch. Impulses are mysterious, and explaining them must be… — Patricia Hampl Copy Share Image
Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person. — Patricia Hampl Copy Share
People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they're in your subconscious, they are immortal. — Patricia Hampl Copy Share
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… — Patricia Hampl Copy Share
“We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories… — Patricia Hampl Copy Share
French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a rummage sale,… — Patricia Hampl Copy Share
Time, we like to say, cures all. But maybe the old saying doesn’t mean time heals. Time cures a secret in its brine, keeping… — Patricia Hampl Copy Share
No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just… — Patricia Hampl Copy Share
Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting mental health,… — Patricia Hampl Copy Share
Prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear on all… — Patricia Hampl Copy Share
The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more… — Patricia Hampl Copy Share
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… — Patricia Hampl Copy Share
The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to… — Patricia Hampl Copy Share
