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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: 72
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Veterinarian
Slipped
Organic
Chemistry
Wanted

More quotes by Amy Hempel

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I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
Amy Hempel
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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
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consolation is a beautiful word. everyone skins his knee-that doesnt make yours hurt anyless.
Amy Hempel
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He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.
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 get rational when I panic.
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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Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.
Amy Hempel
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nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
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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Journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one. You are trained to get rid of anything nonessential. You go in, you start writing your article, assuming a person's going to stop reading the minute you give them a reason. So the trick is: don't give them one.
Amy Hempel
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I thought, my love is so good, why isn't it calling the same thing back.
Amy Hempel
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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
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The worst of it is over now, and I can't say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss--you have gone and lost something else.
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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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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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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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
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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.
Amy Hempel
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A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
Amy Hempel