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

More quotes by Amy Hempel

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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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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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Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.
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In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.
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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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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
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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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I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
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I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.
Amy Hempel
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nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
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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.
Amy Hempel
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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 thought, my love is so good, why isn't it calling the same thing back.
Amy Hempel
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consolation is a beautiful word. everyone skins his knee-that doesnt make yours hurt anyless.
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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.
Amy Hempel
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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.
Amy Hempel
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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 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.
Amy Hempel
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Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?
Amy Hempel
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He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.
Amy Hempel