I Could Tell You Stories Quotes

“You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.”
― Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory

“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, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory

“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 drawn to please them, because to give them an instant of pleasure is to acknowledge their existence.”
― Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory

“If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport.”
― Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory