Patricia Hampl > Quotes

“I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.”
― Patricia Hampl

“You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.”
― Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory

“I waste my life. I want to. It's the thing to do with a life. We were wrong about work--it isn't the best thing, no matter how much you love it. Wasting time is better.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Florist's Daughter

“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 fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be.”
― Patricia Hampl

“We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us ... we are doing the work of memory.”
― Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory

“Life is a journey. A hopeless cliché. But not its fault. Cliché is the fate of every fully absorbed truth. The stars, for example, do look like diamonds. You just can’t say so.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“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. ”
― 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 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.”
― Patricia Hampl

“To speak, to write , without charm is to make utterances without reference to a reality outside oneself. It is an act devoid of the playfulness of art, without the attractive humility of one who know absolutely that others exist and therefore feels drawn to please them, because to give them an instant of pleasure is to acknowledge their existence.”
― Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory

“If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.”
― Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory

“For moderns - for us - there is something illicit, it seems, about wasted time, the empty hours of contemplation when a thought unfurls, figures of speech budding and blossoming, articulation drifting like spent petals onto the dark table we all once gathered around to talk and talk, letting time get the better of us. _Just taking our time_, as we say. That is, letting time take us.

"Can you say," I once inquired of a sixty-year old cloistered nun who had lived (vibrantly, it seemed) from teh age of nineteen in her monastery cell, "what the core of contemplative life is?"

"Leisure," she said, without hesitation, her china blue eyes cheerfully steady on me. I suppose I expected her to say, "Prayer." Or maybe "The search for God." Or "Inner peace." Inner peace would have been good. One of the big-ticket items of spirituality.

She saw I didn't see.

"It takes time to do this," she said finally.

Her "this" being the kind of work that requires abdication from time's industrial purpose (doing things, getting things). By choosing leisure she had bid farewell to the fevered enterprise of getting-and-spending whereby, as the poet said, we lay waste our powers.”
― Patricia Hampl, Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime

“We have chosen a problematic name for ourselves: we are no longer souls as we once were, not even citizens; we're all consumers now, grasping all the stuff every which way.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“History, as it was purveyed to us, was not so much a narrative, not even the detached observation of the rise and fall of fortunes and cultures. It was the litany of loss, attended by the inevitable sympathy for the vanquished side. The past was always the underdog, and we sensed it was only right to be on its side against the bully future. We were left with the impression that our own grip was loosening on some essential pediment as one empire after another was swallowed up, and the centuries collapsed into our own.”
― Patricia Hampl, Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life

“Strange to think of a form of love going extinct, like a carrier pigeon, a rare tortoise, a lilac or apple whose seeds are not to be found anymore, the scent and taste of the thing long lost, never to be touched again.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“So many books I keep meaning to read. I move the titles from one to-do list to another. I don’t bother listing Proust anymore. I’ve read the opening pages about the madeleine cookie soaked in linden flower tea so many times, I’ve come to think of In Search of Lost Time as a short lyric. I get the picture, if not the story. I have time for vignettes, but not for narrative arcs. I start a novel, but keep breaking off to check my iPhone. I-Phone indeed—the busyness of me myself and I.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“Not erotic life, but the pleasure of the mind filling like the lower chamber of an hourglass with the slow-moving grains of a perfect day—sky, carnations, walking, reading, writing, Toasted Cheese, the presence of another who wishes to be so still, so silent too.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“Life is not a story, a settled version. It’s an unsorted heap of images we going through, the familiar snaps taken up and regarded, then tossed back until, unbidden, they rise again, images that float to the surface of the mind, rise, fall, drift—and return only to drift away again in shadow. They never quite die, and they never achieve form. They are the makings of a life, not of a narrative. Not art, but life trailing its poignant desire for art. Call them vignettes, these things we finger and drop again into their shoeboxes.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“We must set out, often without a destination, with only the instinct to search as a direction. Literature and religion are predicated on the notion of journey, movement—pilgrimage it’s called in religion, plot in literature.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“Faith in our time can seem like signing on the dotted line of a prefab doctrine composed of absurdities.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“I already know (or believe—which comes to the same thing in my Catholic worldview) that daydreaming doesn’t make things up. It sees things. Claims things, twirls them around, takes a good look. Possesses them. Embraces them.Makes something of them. Makes sense. Or music. How restful it is, how full of motion. My first paradox.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“. . . the final page of any novel is a destination, the creation of form offering the illusion of inevitability, the denial of chaos. We don’t love novels because they are like life, but because they are unlike it—deftly organized, filled with the satisfaction of shape.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“I need solitude for my writing; not like a hermit—that wouldn’t be enough—but like a dead man.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“But by the time you’ve worked long enough, hard enough, Real Life (which insists on being capitalized as if it were a personage with a proper name and a right to barge into this rental unit called your life) begins to reveal itself as something other than effort, other than accomplishment. Real Life wishes to be left to its own purposeless devices.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“I seem to be annoyed not only with Colette, but with the frame of mind I have inherited along with her—the postmodern pride of calling things by their names, the arrogance of assuming integrity is a matter of being more and more open. Or simply that a label, firmly affixed, is honesty in the face of euphemism and discretion.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“This nostalgia, like much nostalgia, was not for something actually experienced and lost, but for a notion held in the fond focus of the imagination.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“I don’t understand what has happened. But that is has happened—that I know. It is a framed moment, not a story, but something much smaller, a spark of meaning I will return to all my life. The DNA of identity. What, much later, I learn is a vignette, a photo frayed at the edges, its old silver frame stowed in the dark attic of the mind.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“No wonder that, to a writer—to readers, to so many beset people now—solitude suggests not loneliness, but serenity, that kissing cousin of sanity.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“To be alone is to be free”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“This is not uncommon in our supposedly secular age. Meditation, massage, monasteries, spas--the postmodern stomach, if not its soul, knows it needs purging.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day