Patricia Hampl Quotes

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

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

1968

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 your express business to spruce yourself up to be.

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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 that lodged it there. Even they are diluted or denied.

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