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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
Dies
Flashes
Eye
Flash
True
Forth
Past
Truly
Truth
Ready
Also
Alive
Life
Eyes
Start
Rushes

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My job ... I do nothing, it pays nothing, but - you guessed it - it's better than nothing.
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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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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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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 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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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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An idea might spark an essay, but never a story.
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I get rational when I panic.
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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 would like to go for a ride with you, have you take me to stand before a river in the dark where hundreds of lightning bugs blink this code in sequence: right here, nowhere else! Right now, never again!
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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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When the beer is gone, so are they -- flexing their cars on up the boulevard.
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I thought, my love is so good, why isn't it calling the same thing back.
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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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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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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 leave a lot out when I tell the truth
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For peace of mind, I will lie about any thing at any time.
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The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss--you have gone and lost something else.
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