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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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Amy Hempel
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Writing
Sentences
Good
Story
Write
Another
Ends
Stories
Feel
Feels
Sentence
More quotes by Amy Hempel
There’s so much I can’t read because I get so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. I have been up in a plane. Give me some credit.
Amy Hempel
Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.
Amy Hempel
consolation is a beautiful word. everyone skins his knee-that doesnt make yours hurt anyless.
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 leave a lot out when I tell the truth
Amy Hempel
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
He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.
Amy Hempel
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
Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.
Amy Hempel
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
In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.
Amy Hempel
He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.
Amy Hempel
A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
Amy Hempel
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
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
Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.
Amy Hempel
if it's true your life flashes past your eyes before you die, then it is also the truth that your life rushes forth when you are ready to start to truly be alive.
Amy Hempel
I had a mother I could only seem to please with verbal accomplishments of some sort or another. She read constantly, so I read constantly. If I used words that might have seemed surprising at a young age, she would recognize that and it would please her.
Amy Hempel
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
The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.
Amy Hempel