Quotes from Patricia Hampl

I'm afraid of sympathy as if it were a collar, tightening.

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.

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.

Faith isn't what you think, what you 'believe'. It's what you do.

what is the foundation of contemplative life? 'Oh, she said, without a pause -- leisure, it's based on leisure.

Description, which had seemed like background in novels, static and inert as a butterfly pinned to the pages of my notebook, proved to be a dynamic engine that stoked voice and, even more, propelled the occasional narrative arc.

To be alone is to be free

We must learn to be alone in the midst of whatever denies us useful solitude.

Coffee was a food in that house, not a drink.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I need solitude for my writing; not like a hermit—that wouldn't be enough—but like a dead man.

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.