66 Quotes by Patricia Hampl

The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoir that fits us all.

I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.

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

Writing about why you write is a funny business, like scratching what doesn’t itch. Impulses are mysterious, and explaining them must be done with mirrors, like certain cunning slight-of-hand routines.

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

So many books I keep meaning to read. I move the titles from one to-do list to another. I don’t bother listing Proust anymore. I’ve read the opening pages about the madeleine cookie soaked in linden flower tea so many times, I’ve come to think of In Search of Lost Time as a short lyric. I get the picture, if not the story. I have time for vignettes, but not for narrative arcs. I start a novel, but keep breaking off to check my iPhone. I-Phone indeed – the busyness of me myself and I.

The real subject of autobiography is not one’s experience but one’s consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool.

The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.

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