Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Amy Hempel
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Stand
Sequence
Dark
Lightning
Else
Hundreds
Take
Nowhere
Right
Ride
Never
River
Would
Code
Blink
Like
Rivers
Bugs

More quotes by Amy Hempel

Image
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.
Amy Hempel
Image
They say the smart dog obeys but the smarter dog knows when to disobey.
Amy Hempel
Image
It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.
Amy Hempel
Image
Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.
Amy Hempel
Image
What I think, Chatty says, is that if a man loves a woman more than a woman loves a man, then they're even.
Amy Hempel
Image
All those years on the psychiatrist's couch and suddenly the couch is moving. Good God, she is on that couch when the big one hits. Maidy didn't tell you, but you know what her doctor said? She sprang from the couch and said, My God, was that an earthquake? The doctor said this: Did it feel like an earthquake to you?
Amy Hempel
Image
We can only die in the future, I thought right now we are always alive.
Amy Hempel
Image
I'm not good at small talk I'm not good at big talk and medium talk just doesn't come up.
Amy Hempel
Image
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?
Amy Hempel
Image
In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.
Amy Hempel
Image
nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
Amy Hempel
Image
He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.
Amy Hempel
Image
The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.
Amy Hempel
Image
I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.
Amy Hempel
Image
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.
Amy Hempel
Image
I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.
Amy Hempel
Image
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.
Amy Hempel
Image
My job ... I do nothing, it pays nothing, but - you guessed it - it's better than nothing.
Amy Hempel
Image
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.
Amy Hempel
Image
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.
Amy Hempel