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Patricia Hampl Biography

Patricia Hampl (born March 12, 1946) is an American memoirist, writer, lecturer, and educator. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and is one of the founding members of the Loft Literary Center.

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Patricia Hampl Quotes

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

Know, Knows, Order, Write, Writing

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

Keep, Paper, Secret, Self, Trying

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

Flying, Foxhole, Foxholes, Knees, Planes

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.

Catlike, Heart, Mystery, Real, Thinking

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.

Lacing, Night, Pride, Seemed, Together, Winter

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.

Memories, Memory, Spiritual, Store, Writing

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 it and finally, paradoxically, destroying it. Nothing is left in that salt solution but the pain or rage, the biting shame that lodged it there. Even they are diluted or denied.

Left, Maybe, Mean, Pain, Paradoxically, Secret

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.

Attention, Bear, Focus, Prayer, Seen, Way

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

Captivating, Firsts, Memories, Memory, Mystery

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

Become, Life, Looking, Memories, Past, Phenomenon

Memoirists wish to tell their mind, not their story.

Memoirists, Mind, Stories, Story, Wish

Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.

Crowded, Humble, Night, Time, Truth, Voice

The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoir that fits us all.

Hands, Humble, Poetry, Tatters, True

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

Dream, Immortal, Leave, People, Subconscious

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

Decency, Envy, Might, Passion, Poverty

poetry is the sung voice of accurate perception.

Perception, Poetry, Voice

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

Careful, Draft, Failed, Firsts

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

Enough, People, Polite, Politeness

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.

Crazy, Hands, Heap, Life, Play, Silence

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.

Cunning, Hands, Itch, Mirrors, Mysterious, Writing

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Patricia Hampl Biography

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