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I know that homes burn and that you should think what to save before they start to. Not because, in the heat of it, everything looks as valuable as everything else. But, because nothing looks worth the bother, not even your life.

Amy Hempel

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Amy Hempel
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Everything
Bother
Nothing
Heat
Looks
Valuable
Even
Save
Think
Worth
Thinking
Start
Life
Else
Homes
Home
Burn

More quotes by Amy Hempel

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I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
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It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.
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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 think you would like Warren. He drinks Courvoisier in a Coke can, and has a laugh like you'd find in a cartoon bubble.
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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 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.
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An idea might spark an essay, but never a story.
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He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.
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The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.
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I get rational when I panic.
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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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Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber thinking it was zucchini. That's the kind of thing that turns my heart right over.
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I leave a lot out when I tell the truth
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In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.
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When the beer is gone, so are they -- flexing their cars on up the boulevard.
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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?
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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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For peace of mind, I will lie about any thing at any time.
Amy Hempel
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Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.
Amy Hempel
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Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.
Amy Hempel