The Art of the Wasted Day Quotes

“Life is a journey. A hopeless cliché. But not its fault. Cliché is the fate of every fully absorbed truth. The stars, for example, do look like diamonds. You just can’t say so.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“We have chosen a problematic name for ourselves: we are no longer souls as we once were, not even citizens; we're all consumers now, grasping all the stuff every which way.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“Not erotic life, but the pleasure of the mind filling like the lower chamber of an hourglass with the slow-moving grains of a perfect day—sky, carnations, walking, reading, writing, Toasted Cheese, the presence of another who wishes to be so still, so silent too.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“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.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“Strange to think of a form of love going extinct, like a carrier pigeon, a rare tortoise, a lilac or apple whose seeds are not to be found anymore, the scent and taste of the thing long lost, never to be touched again.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“I already know (or believe—which comes to the same thing in my Catholic worldview) that daydreaming doesn’t make things up. It sees things. Claims things, twirls them around, takes a good look. Possesses them. Embraces them.Makes something of them. Makes sense. Or music. How restful it is, how full of motion. My first paradox.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“I need solitude for my writing; not like a hermit—that wouldn’t be enough—but like a dead man.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“Faith in our time can seem like signing on the dotted line of a prefab doctrine composed of absurdities.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“Life is not a story, a settled version. It’s an unsorted heap of images we going through, the familiar snaps taken up and regarded, then tossed back until, unbidden, they rise again, images that float to the surface of the mind, rise, fall, drift—and return only to drift away again in shadow. They never quite die, and they never achieve form. They are the makings of a life, not of a narrative. Not art, but life trailing its poignant desire for art. Call them vignettes, these things we finger and drop again into their shoeboxes.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“. . . the final page of any novel is a destination, the creation of form offering the illusion of inevitability, the denial of chaos. We don’t love novels because they are like life, but because they are unlike it—deftly organized, filled with the satisfaction of shape.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“We must set out, often without a destination, with only the instinct to search as a direction. Literature and religion are predicated on the notion of journey, movement—pilgrimage it’s called in religion, plot in literature.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“But by the time you’ve worked long enough, hard enough, Real Life (which insists on being capitalized as if it were a personage with a proper name and a right to barge into this rental unit called your life) begins to reveal itself as something other than effort, other than accomplishment. Real Life wishes to be left to its own purposeless devices.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“We seek retreats for ourselves, houses in the country, seashores, mountains. But . . . we have in our power to retire into ourselves. For there is no retreat that is quieter and freer from trouble than our soul . . . perfect tranquility, the right ordering of mind. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“This is not uncommon in our supposedly secular age. Meditation, massage, monasteries, spas--the postmodern stomach, if not its soul, knows it needs purging.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“We must learn to be alone in the midst of whatever denies us useful solitude.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“To be alone is to be free”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“No wonder that, to a writer—to readers, to so many beset people now—solitude suggests not loneliness, but serenity, that kissing cousin of sanity.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“Looking not for “a self,” that thing modernity keeps saying we’re looking for when that is the last thing we need, choking on our individuality. Looking for his mind.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“for myself, the past per se holds little interest, and the present offers only the profound malaise of a culture increasingly devoid of the protocols of self-reflection.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“The shame of it—the cost of leisure being someone else’s hard labor and broken body.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“The longing for solitude is a deeply romantic passion. But then writing is a romantic thing to do, predicated on desire, urgency, and an ideal of human connection, hardly available in what we wistfully call real life.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“Solitude provides the illusion—or is it the reality?—of a self. If I’m alone I can think dark thoughts, be real, be phony, try this, try that. Erase, contradict, forge ahead, double back.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“In my reading, I sought a contemporary, someone who lived what I thought of as my “other life,” the one not lived, but so lavishly imagined and desired that it felt not like another life, but a version of my own. You feel—I did—deep contentment when you find such a life expressed by a writer who has lived it, as if in reading that life you (sort of) live it too.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“Nothing is perfect for long, though sometimes it’s perfect for a little while. It can only be pried out of the moment, sequestered between the red leatherette covers where it begins its career as a memory. Bits of reality are pressed to the pages like wildflowers, flattened and faded, but there.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“This is how memory works: not as a transcription but as an attempt—as an essay is an attempt . . . to locate meaning between the irretrievable then and the equally unfathomable now.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“I don’t understand what has happened. But that is has happened—that I know. It is a framed moment, not a story, but something much smaller, a spark of meaning I will return to all my life. The DNA of identity. What, much later, I learn is a vignette, a photo frayed at the edges, its old silver frame stowed in the dark attic of the mind.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“This nostalgia, like much nostalgia, was not for something actually experienced and lost, but for a notion held in the fond focus of the imagination.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day

“I seem to be annoyed not only with Colette, but with the frame of mind I have inherited along with her—the postmodern pride of calling things by their names, the arrogance of assuming integrity is a matter of being more and more open. Or simply that a label, firmly affixed, is honesty in the face of euphemism and discretion.”
― Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day