Writing was the soul of everything else ... Wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.
Patricia HamplSilence, that inspired dealer, takes the day's deck, the life, all in a crazy heap, lays it out, and plays its flawless hand of solitaire, every card in place. Scoops them up, and does it all over again.
Patricia HamplThe real subject of autobiography is not one's experience but one's consciousness. Memoirists use the self as a tool.
Patricia HamplLooking repeatedly into the past, you do not necessarily become fascinated with your own life, but rather with the phenomenon of memory.
Patricia HamplMemoir 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.
Patricia Hampl