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.

Patricia Hampl

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

pride winter night

Memoirists, unlike fiction writers, do not really want to 'tell a story.' They want to tell it all - the all of personal experience, of consciousness itself. That includes a story, but also the whole expanding universe of sensation and thought ... Memoirists wish to tell their mind. Not their story.

Patricia Hampl

expanding-universe wish mind

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

Patricia Hampl

immortal dream people

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

taste writing book

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

focus prayer attention

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

splendor celebration art

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

spiritual writing memories

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

Patricia Hampl

knows writing order

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

Patricia Hampl

literature self world

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

Patricia Hampl

acquired-taste oneself taste

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

Patricia Hampl

mystery memories firsts

The paradox: there can be no pilgrimage without a destination, but the destination is also not the real point of the endeavor. Not the destination, but the willingness to wander in pursuit characterizes pilgrimage. Willingness: to hear the tales along the way, to make the casual choices of travel, to acquiesce even to boredom. That's pilgrimage -- a mind full of journey.

Patricia Hampl

boredom real journey

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

golden substance light

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

writing memories long

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

burden stories

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

Patricia Hampl

easy writing sometimes

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

Patricia Hampl

careful firsts

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

Patricia Hampl

persons soul writing

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

knitting humble night

What is remembered is what becomes reality.

Patricia Hampl

remembered reality