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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
Spiritual
Look
Come
Looks
Carnal
Think
Concerns
Thinking
Shakespeare
Concern
Read

More quotes by Amy Hempel

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The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.
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I'm not first and foremost interested in story and the what-happens, but I'm interested in who's telling it and how they're telling it and the effects of whatever happened on the characters and the people.
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Just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.
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I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry.
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I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea how to write fiction. So I did journalism because there were rules I could learn. You can teach someone to write a news story. They might not write a great one, but you can teach that pretty easily.
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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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For peace of mind, I will lie about any thing at any time.
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I'm not good at small talk I'm not good at big talk and medium talk just doesn't come up.
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A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
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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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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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I meet a person, and in my mind I'm saying three minutes I give you three minutes to show me the spark.
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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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What I think, Chatty says, is that if a man loves a woman more than a woman loves a man, then they're even.
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It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.
Amy Hempel
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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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I think you would like Warren. He drinks Courvoisier in a Coke can, and has a laugh like you'd find in a cartoon bubble.
Amy Hempel
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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.
Amy Hempel
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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 think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
Amy Hempel