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I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry.
Amy Hempel
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Amy Hempel
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Veterinarian
Slipped
Organic
Chemistry
Wanted
More quotes by Amy Hempel
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
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 get rational when I panic.
Amy Hempel
I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.
Amy Hempel
It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.
Amy Hempel
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
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
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
For peace of mind, I will lie about any thing at any time.
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
I'm not good at small talk I'm not good at big talk and medium talk just doesn't come up.
Amy Hempel
I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
Amy Hempel
A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
Amy Hempel
My job ... I do nothing, it pays nothing, but - you guessed it - it's better than nothing.
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
I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.
Amy Hempel
Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.
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 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
Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.
Amy Hempel