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Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.

Amy Hempel

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Amy Hempel
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Come
Looks
Carnal
Think
Concerns
Thinking
Shakespeare
Concern
Read
Spiritual
Look

More quotes by Amy Hempel

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Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.
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I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
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I get rational when I panic.
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In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.
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I know that homes burn and that you should think what to save before they start to. Not because, in the heat of it, everything looks as valuable as everything else. But, because nothing looks worth the bother, not even your life.
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Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good?
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I sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see by its level if the coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking is still me.
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Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don't get all writerly: 'He opened the door.' There, it's open.
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As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn't know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life.
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I assemble stories-me and a hundred million other people-at the sentence level. Not by coming up with a sweeping story line.
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Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?
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We can only die in the future, I thought right now we are always alive.
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Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.
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Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber thinking it was zucchini. That's the kind of thing that turns my heart right over.
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Then the children went to bed, or at least went upstairs, and the men joined the women for a cigarette on the porch, absently picking ticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women's cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought stay.
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When my mother died, my father's early widowhood gave him social cachet he would not have had if they had divorced. He was a bigger catch for the sorrow attached.
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I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.
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I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.
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nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
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I thought, my love is so good, why isn't it calling the same thing back.
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