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Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl Books

Memoirist

Virgin Time

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“For moderns - for us - there is something illicit, it seems, about wasted time, the empty hours of contemplation when a thought unfurls, figures of speech budding and blossoming, articulation drifting like spent petals onto the dark table we all once gathered around to talk and talk, letting time get the better of us. _Just taking our time_, as we say. That is, letting time take us. "Can you say," I once inquired of a sixty-year old cloistered nun who had lived (vibrantly, it seemed) from teh age of nineteen in her monastery cell, "what the core of contemplative life is?" "Leisure," she said, without hesitation, her china blue eyes cheerfully steady on me. I suppose I expected her to say, "Prayer." Or maybe "The search for God." Or "Inner peace." Inner peace would have been good. One of the big-ticket items of spirituality. She saw I didn't see. "It takes time to do this," she said finally. Her "this" being the kind of work that requires abdication from time's industrial purpose (doing things, getting things). By choosing leisure she had bid farewell to the fevered enterprise of getting-and-spending whereby, as the poet said, we lay waste our powers.”

SpiritualityMeditationLeisureReligious Life
Book:Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime
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“These days it seems the lyric impulse, so seemingly fragile, comes in for a lot of abuse-or simply a lot of mistrust. What's it for, anyway, in this hard-edged, worried world? Into this cultural uncertainty Gregory Orr's spirited meditation on the surprisingly tensile strength of poetry in the face of profound suffering and grief presents a welcome fresh view of the ancient human instinct to cry out and to praise.”

WorldHumansHardSeemsFacesSufferingViewsGriefMeditationCryAbusePraiseInstinctProfoundAncientWelcomeWorriedImpulseUncertaintyThese DaysFragileMistrustSpirited
Author:Patricia Hampl
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“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.”

WayMindRealChoicesJourneyPursuitTalesWanderBoredomParadoxDestinationWillingnessEndeavorCasualPilgrimage
Book:Spillville: A Collaboration
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“In description we hear and feel the absorption of the author in the material. We sense the presence of the creator of the scene. .. This personal absorption is what we mean by 'style.' It is strange that we would choose so oddly surfacey a word - style - for this most soulful aspect of writing. We could, perhaps more exactly, call this relation between consciousness and its subject 'integrity.' What else is the articulation of perception?”

FeelsWritingMeanPoetryLiteratureConsciousnessSubjectsStyleStrangeMaterialsIntegrityScenePerceptionAspectRelationCreatorDescriptionSoulfulAbsorptionArticulation
Author:Patricia Hampl
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“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.”

WorldSelfNightVoiceMaterialsIndustrySingingRelationSeekingCornersHumbleMemoirNarrativeAutobiographyEssaysAssuredFoldsCrowdedFluidTrustworthyPersonal ExperiencesCottagesKnittingFugitiveAriaVoice Singing
Author:Patricia Hampl
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“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.”

IfsGivingBookWould BeReadingLiteratureSportsConversationPagesCeaseIntimateSpiteReviewsBellsSpectatorsParticipantsMuteDegeneratesResonanceMonologuesBook Review
Author:Patricia Hampl
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“Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relationship with the past. Psychotherapy, that widespread method for promoting mental health, relies heavily on memory and on the ability to retrieve and organize images and events from the personal pastIf we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us—to write the first draft and then return for the second draft—we are doing the work of memory.”

WritingFirstsStoriesPastMovingMemoriesAbilityEventsReturnHealthyCapacityMethodMental HealthMoving ForwardDevelopingRelyOrganizePromotingPsychotherapyHealthy Relationship
Author:Patricia Hampl
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