66 Quotes by Patricia Hampl

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.