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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.

Amy Hempel

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Amy Hempel
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Right
Cucumber
Heart
Cucumbers
Thing
Steam
Kind
Died
Thinking
Seen
Since
Turns
Mother
Zucchini

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The only time the word baby doesn't scare me is the time that it should, when it is what a man calls me.
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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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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.
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I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and over again: Is this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is: Put your cards on the table.
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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 leave a lot out when I tell the truth
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There’s so much I can’t read because I get so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. I have been up in a plane. Give me some credit.
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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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He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.
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I could claim any number of high-flown reasons for writing, just as you can explain certain dogs behavior... But maybe, it’s that they’re dog, and that’s what dogs do.
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I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.
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I had a mother I could only seem to please with verbal accomplishments of some sort or another. She read constantly, so I read constantly. If I used words that might have seemed surprising at a young age, she would recognize that and it would please her.
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I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
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I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry.
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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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Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.
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Journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one. You are trained to get rid of anything nonessential. You go in, you start writing your article, assuming a person's going to stop reading the minute you give them a reason. So the trick is: don't give them one.
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When the beer is gone, so are they -- flexing their cars on up the boulevard.
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In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.
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