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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.

Amy Hempel

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Amy Hempel
Age: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Story
Million
Stories
Line
People
Hundred
Level
Coming
Assemble
Levels
Sweeping
Millions
Sentence
Lines
Sentences

More quotes by Amy Hempel

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I leave a lot out when I tell the truth
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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He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.
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.
Amy Hempel
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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.
Amy Hempel
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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
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nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
Amy Hempel
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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?
Amy Hempel
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Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.
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
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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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I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.
Amy Hempel
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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.
Amy Hempel
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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.
Amy Hempel
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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!
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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It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.
Amy Hempel
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In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.
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.
Amy Hempel
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They say the smart dog obeys but the smarter dog knows when to disobey.
Amy Hempel