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A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.

Amy Hempel

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Amy Hempel
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Always
Love
Beloved
Affair
Instance
Begins
Fantasy

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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.
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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.
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The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.
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Just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.
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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.
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It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.
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In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.
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I get rational when I panic.
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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.
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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.
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The only time the word baby doesn't scare me is the time that it should, when it is what a man calls me.
Amy Hempel
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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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We can only die in the future, I thought right now we are always alive.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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