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I leave a lot out when I tell the truth

Amy Hempel

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Amy Hempel
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Leave
Tell
Truth

More quotes by Amy Hempel

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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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In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.
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I probably have less revision than those who have that wonderful rush of story to tell - you know, I can't wait to tell you what happened the other day. It comes tumbling out and maybe then they go back and refine. I kind of envy that way of working, but I just have never done it.
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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.
Amy Hempel
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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.
Amy Hempel
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My job ... I do nothing, it pays nothing, but - you guessed it - it's better than nothing.
Amy Hempel
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I meet a person, and in my mind I'm saying three minutes I give you three minutes to show me the spark.
Amy Hempel
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We can only die in the future, I thought right now we are always alive.
Amy Hempel
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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.
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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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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I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.
Amy Hempel
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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.
Amy Hempel
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Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.
Amy Hempel
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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
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nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
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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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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Just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.
Amy Hempel
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The other day I was playing Scrabble. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?
Amy Hempel