The Art of the Wasted Day
Patricia Hampl
Top 10 Best 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I need solitude for my writing; not like a hermit—that wouldn’t be enough—but like a dead man.”
“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.”
“Faith in our time can seem like signing on the dotted line of a prefab doctrine composed of absurdities.”
Except where otherwise noted, all rights reserved to the author(s) of this book (mentioned above). The content of this page serves solely as promotional material for the aforementioned book. If you enjoyed these quotes, you can support the author(s) by acquiring the full book from Amazon.
Book Keywords:
consumerism, images, citizens, memories, love, soul, cliche, materialism, faith, life, journey, stories, lost-love, food-for-thought
