Quotes from Patricia Hampl

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.

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.

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.

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

for myself, the past per se holds little interest, and the present offers only the profound malaise of a culture increasingly devoid of the protocols of self-reflection.

Looking not for "a self," that thing modernity keeps saying we're looking for when that is the last thing we need, choking on our individuality. Looking for his mind.

To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die

Words are partly thoughts, but mostly they're music, deep down. Thinking itself is, perhaps, orchestral, the mind conducting the world. Conducting it, constructing it.

For the worker bee, life is given over to the grim satisfaction of striking a firm line through a task accomplished. On to the next, and the next. Check, check. Done and done. It explains—and solves—nothing to call this workaholism.

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.

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.