Patricia Hampl

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

— Patricia Hampl

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

— Patricia Hampl

We store in memory only images of value. The value may be lost over the passage of time, but that's the implacable…

— Patricia Hampl

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

— Patricia Hampl

“We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell…

— Patricia Hampl

French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a…

— Patricia Hampl

Time, we like to say, cures all. But maybe the old saying doesn’t mean time heals. Time cures a secret in its…

— Patricia Hampl

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

— Patricia Hampl

No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after…

— Patricia Hampl

Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting…

— Patricia Hampl

Prayer as focus is not a way of limiting what can be seen; it is a habit of attention brought to bear…

— Patricia Hampl

The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into…

— Patricia Hampl

poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.

— Patricia Hampl

The artist's work, it is sometimes said, is to celebrate. But really that is not so; it is to express wonder. And…

— Patricia Hampl

The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their…

— Patricia Hampl

The cold was our pride, the snow was our beauty. It fell and fell, lacing day and night together in a milky…

— Patricia Hampl

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

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

— Patricia Hampl

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

— Patricia Hampl

These days it seems the lyric impulse, so seemingly fragile, comes in for a lot of abuse-or simply a lot of mistrust.…

— Patricia Hampl

We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something--make something--with it. A story, we…

— Patricia Hampl

“To speak, to write , without charm is to make utterances without reference to a reality outside oneself. It is an act…

— Patricia Hampl

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

— Patricia Hampl

Here, in memory, we live and die.

— Patricia Hampl

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

— Patricia Hampl