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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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Amy Hempel
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: December 14
Journalist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Men
Time
Scare
Calls
Baby
Word
Doesn

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Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?
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When the beer is gone, so are they -- flexing their cars on up the boulevard.
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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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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.
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He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.
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I thought, my love is so good, why isn't it calling the same thing back.
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I've always known when I start a story what the last line is. It's always been the case, since the first story I ever wrote. I don't know how it's going to get there, but I seem to need the destination. I need to know where I end up. It never changes, ever.
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I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.
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I get rational when I panic.
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In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.
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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 wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry.
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I leave a lot out when I tell the truth
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Just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.
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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.
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I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.
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