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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!

Amy Hempel

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Amy Hempel
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Like
Rivers
Bugs
Stand
Sequence
Dark
Lightning
Else
Hundreds
Take
Nowhere
Right
Ride
Never
River
Would
Code
Blink

More quotes by Amy Hempel

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We can only die in the future, I thought right now we are always alive.
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I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry.
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I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.
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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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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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Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.
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I get rational when I panic.
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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 want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.
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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 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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In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.
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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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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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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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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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For peace of mind, I will lie about any thing at any time.
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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 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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He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.
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