Quotes from Patricia Hampl

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.

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.

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

Silence was the first prayer I learned to trust.

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

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.

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

landscape, that vast still life, invites description, not narration. It is lyric. It has no story: it is the beloved, and asks only to be contemplated.

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

Refuse to write your life and you have no life.

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.

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.

This is how memory works: not as a transcription but as an attempt—as an essay is an attempt . . . to locate meaning between the irretrievable then and the equally unfathomable now.

This is not uncommon in our supposedly secular age. Meditation, massage, monasteries, spas--the postmodern stomach, if not its soul, knows it needs purging.

Nothing is perfect for long, though sometimes it's perfect for a little while. It can only be pried out of the moment, sequestered between the red leatherette covers where it begins its career as a memory. Bits of reality are pressed to the pages like wildflowers, flattened and faded, but there.

Innocence is a temporary, maybe even an unreal, condition. Destined to die. Innocence lost is supposed to be experience gained, and therefore not a bad trade. The fortunate fall as Professor Youngblood taught us in Milton 3111. But what if innocence is never lost, never forfeited Then it can't rise to the edifying abstraction of 'experience.

Jonah, being a writer, is a slow learner, stubborn, self-righteous, not given to trust [ Out of the Garden ].

In my reading, I sought a contemporary, someone who lived what I thought of as my "other life," the one not lived, but so lavishly imagined and desired that it felt not like another life, but a version of my own. You feel—I did—deep contentment when you find such a life expressed by a writer who has lived it, as if in reading that life you (sort of) live it too.

The shame of it—the cost of leisure being someone else's hard labor and broken body.

Solitude provides the illusion—or is it the reality?—of a self. If I'm alone I can think dark thoughts, be real, be phony, try this, try that. Erase, contradict, forge ahead, double back.

The rare innocence of my father never hardens into experience, into knowing what's what. He never achieves irony, the consolation prize for losing innocence and gaining experience. IT would be comic except that innocence is never comic when it is an article of faith.

The longing for solitude is a deeply romantic passion. But then writing is a romantic thing to do, predicated on desire, urgency, and an ideal of human connection, hardly available in what we wistfully call real life.

It's strange that we still believe in inspiration when, compared to earlier ages, we seem to believe in so little. Inspiration may be the one bit of God we haven't managed to kill off.

We seek retreats for ourselves, houses in the country, seashores, mountains. But . . . we have in our power to retire into ourselves. For there is no retreat that is quieter and freer from trouble than our soul . . . perfect tranquility, the right ordering of mind. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations