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consolation is a beautiful word. everyone skins his knee-that doesnt make yours hurt anyless.

Amy Hempel

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Amy Hempel
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Everyone
Beautiful
Make
Knee
Consolation
Knees
Skins
Hurt
Word

More quotes by Amy Hempel

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Journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one. You are trained to get rid of anything nonessential. You go in, you start writing your article, assuming a person's going to stop reading the minute you give them a reason. So the trick is: don't give them one.
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nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
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Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.
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I assemble stories-me and a hundred million other people-at the sentence level. Not by coming up with a sweeping story line.
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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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Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?
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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.
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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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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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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 have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and over again: Is this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is: Put your cards on the table.
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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.
Amy Hempel
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A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
Amy Hempel
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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.
Amy Hempel
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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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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.
Amy Hempel
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I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry.
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When the beer is gone, so are they -- flexing their cars on up the boulevard.
Amy Hempel
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An idea might spark an essay, but never a story.
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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.
Amy Hempel