Quote

if it's true your life flashes past your eyes before you die, then it is also the truth that your life rushes forth when you are ready to start to truly be alive.

Amy Hempel

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Amy Hempel
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Life
Eyes
Start
Rushes
Dies
Flashes
Eye
Flash
True
Forth
Past
Truly
Truth
Ready
Also
Alive

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I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry.
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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 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 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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nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
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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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I probably have less revision than those who have that wonderful rush of story to tell - you know, I can't wait to tell you what happened the other day. It comes tumbling out and maybe then they go back and refine. I kind of envy that way of working, but I just have never done it.
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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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I am not quite myself, I think.But who here is quite himself? And yet there is a way in which we are all more ourselves than ever, I suppose.
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Sometimes I can better describe a person by another person's reaction. In a story in my first book, I couldn't think of a way to sufficiently describe the charisma of a certain boy, so the narrator says, I knew girls who saved his gum.
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A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
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And I see that not touching for so long was a drive to the beach with the windows rolled up so the waves feel that much colder.
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I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.
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We can only die in the future, I thought right now we are always alive.
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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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The other day I was playing Scrabble. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?
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He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.
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An idea might spark an essay, but never a story.
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I've always known when I start a story what the last line is. It's always been the case, since the first story I ever wrote. I don't know how it's going to get there, but I seem to need the destination. I need to know where I end up. It never changes, ever.
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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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