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Quote by Patricia Hampl

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

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Patricia Hampl is a renowned American memoirist, born on March 12, 1946. Her works are known for their profound personal perspective and exploration of memory, which have won her a wide readership. more

“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.”

Mean Pain Left Secret Solutions Shame Rage Heal Cures Destroying Denied Salt Biting Old Saying Time Heals

Author:Patricia Hampl

“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.”

Ifs Giving Book Would Be Reading Literature Sports Conversation Pages Cease Intimate Spite Reviews Bells Spectators Participants Mute Degenerates Resonance Monologues Book Review

Author:Patricia Hampl

“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.”

Writing Book Facts Bigs Deals Taste Oneself Bows Big Deal Knocked Down Write Your Own Acquired Taste

Author:Patricia Hampl

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

Past Memories Phenomenon Fascinated

Author:Patricia Hampl

“In memory each of us is an artist: each of us creates.”

Artist Memories

Author:Patricia Hampl

“Refuse to write your life and you have no life.”

Writing Refuse

Author:Patricia Hampl

“Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.”

Taste Oneself Acquired Taste

Author:Patricia Hampl

“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.”

“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.”

May Feelings Values Lost Memories Judgment Stores Passages Passage Of Time

Author:Patricia Hampl

Quote by Patricia Hampl

Author

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