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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

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Amy Hempel
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Coastal
Water
Stills
Trembling
Earth
Shaking
Still
Glass
Glasses
Level
Levels
Nightstand
Sleep

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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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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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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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He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.
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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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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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nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
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consolation is a beautiful word. everyone skins his knee-that doesnt make yours hurt anyless.
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I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry.
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I get rational when I panic.
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A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
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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 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 leave a lot out when I tell the truth
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I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
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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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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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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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In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.
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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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