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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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Amy Hempel
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
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Illinois
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Gum
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More quotes by Amy Hempel
The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss--you have gone and lost something else.
Amy Hempel
Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?
Amy Hempel
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.
Amy Hempel
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
The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.
Amy Hempel
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
I thought, my love is so good, why isn't it calling the same thing back.
Amy Hempel
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
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?
Amy Hempel
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.
Amy Hempel
Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.
Amy Hempel
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
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.
Amy Hempel
They say the smart dog obeys but the smarter dog knows when to disobey.
Amy Hempel
My job ... I do nothing, it pays nothing, but - you guessed it - it's better than nothing.
Amy Hempel
Just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.
Amy Hempel
In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.
Amy Hempel
I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.
Amy Hempel
We can only die in the future, I thought right now we are always alive.
Amy Hempel
When the beer is gone, so are they -- flexing their cars on up the boulevard.
Amy Hempel