66 Quotes by Patricia Hampl

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.

People come and go in life, but they never leave your dreams. Once they’re in your subconscious, they are immortal.

The golden light of metaphor, which is the intelligence of poetry, was implicit in alchemical study. To change, magically, one substance into another, more valuable one is the ancient function of metaphor, as it was of alchemy.

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.

We only store in memory images of value. To write about one’s life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.

The world is full of mystery but it must not be choked with secrets: we must talk to one another.

Maybe being oneself is always an acquired taste.

We do not, after all, simply have experience; we are entrusted with it. We must do something – make something – with it. A story, we sense is the only possible habitation for the burden of our witnessing.

Refuse to write your life and you have no life.