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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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Amy Hempel
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Writing
Flats
Sentence
Opened
Sentences
Writerly
Door
Doors
Footed
Open
Serves
Sometimes
Flat

More quotes by Amy Hempel

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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 moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.
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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 because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.
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I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.
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consolation is a beautiful word. everyone skins his knee-that doesnt make yours hurt anyless.
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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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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.
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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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I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.
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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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I leave a lot out when I tell the truth
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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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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.
Amy Hempel
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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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And I see that not touching for so long was a drive to the beach with the windows rolled up so the waves feel that much colder.
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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.
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An idea might spark an essay, but never a story.
Amy Hempel
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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?
Amy Hempel
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For peace of mind, I will lie about any thing at any time.
Amy Hempel