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I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.

Amy Hempel

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Amy Hempel
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
People
Effects
Leave
Often
Feel
Feels

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When the beer is gone, so are they -- flexing their cars on up the boulevard.
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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 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 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!
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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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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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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 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'm not first and foremost interested in story and the what-happens, but I'm interested in who's telling it and how they're telling it and the effects of whatever happened on the characters and the people.
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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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I'm not good at small talk I'm not good at big talk and medium talk just doesn't come up.
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For peace of mind, I will lie about any thing at any time.
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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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Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.
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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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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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My job ... I do nothing, it pays nothing, but - you guessed it - it's better than nothing.
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They say the smart dog obeys but the smarter dog knows when to disobey.
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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.
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I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry.
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