Quotes by Patricia Hampl

About Patricia Hampl:

Patricia Hampl is an American memoirist, writer, lecturer, and educator. She is a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and is one of the founding members of the Loft Literary Center.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

We carry our wounds and perhaps even worse, our capacity to wound, forward with us. If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us ... we are doing the work of memory.

Patricia Hampl

To speak, to write , without charm is to make utterances without reference to a reality outside oneself. It is an act devoid of the playfulness of art, without the attractive humility of one who know absolutely that others exist and therefore feels d...

Patricia Hampl

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

Patricia Hampl

History, as it was purveyed to us, was not so much a narrative, not even the detached observation of the rise and fall of fortunes and cultures. It was the litany of loss, attended by the inevitable sympathy for the vanquished side. The past was alwa...

Patricia Hampl

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

Patricia Hampl

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 ...

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 ...

Patricia Hampl

Author Bio

  • NamePatricia Hampl
  • DescriptionMemoirist, writer, educator
  • BornMarch 12, 1946
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellows Program