Top 40 Patricia Hampl Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they’re in your subconscious, they are immortal.”

— Patricia Hampl

2. “The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy.”

— Patricia Hampl

3. “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.”

— Patricia Hampl

4. “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.”

— Patricia Hampl

5. “I don’t write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.”

— Patricia Hampl

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

— Patricia Hampl

7. “We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something – make something – with it. A story, we sense is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.”

— Patricia Hampl

8. “Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.”

— Patricia Hampl

9. “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.”

— Patricia Hampl

10. “Refuse to write your life and you have no life.”

— Patricia Hampl

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

— Patricia Hampl

12. “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.”

— Patricia Hampl

13. “No memoirists writes for long without experiencing an unsettling disbelief about the reliability of memory, a hunch that memory is not, after all, just memory.”

— Patricia Hampl

14. “A careful first draft is a failed first draft.”

— Patricia Hampl

15. “Here, in memory, we live and die.”

— Patricia Hampl

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

— Patricia Hampl

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

— Patricia Hampl

18. “In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.”

— Patricia Hampl

19. “Memoirists wish to tell their mind, not their story.”

— Patricia Hampl

20. “Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.”

— Patricia Hampl

21. “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.”

— Patricia Hampl

22. “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.”

— Patricia Hampl

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

— Patricia Hampl

24. “It’s always a thrilling risk to say exactly what you mean, to express exactly what you see.”

— Patricia Hampl

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

— Patricia Hampl

26. “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

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

— Patricia Hampl

28. “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.”

— Patricia Hampl

29. “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 resides at the heart of wonder. Celebration is social, amenable. Wonder has a chaotic splendor.”

— Patricia Hampl

30. “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

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

— Patricia Hampl

32. “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

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

— Patricia Hampl

34. “French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a rummage sale, rusty and missing a lot of essential parts.”

— Patricia Hampl

35. “The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.”

— Patricia Hampl

36. “Poverty didn’t necessarily engender an envy of wealth; sometimes it might beget a passion for decency.”

— Patricia Hampl

37. “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

38. “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

39. “I need solitude for my writing; not like a hermit – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.”

— Patricia Hampl

40. “Planes are my foxhole. I’m always on my knees in them.”

— Patricia Hampl

41. “Faith in our time can seem like signing on the dotted line of a prefab doctrine composed of absurdities.”

— Patricia Hampl