Amy Hempel quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Amy Hempel

Top Amy Hempel Quotes

Browse top 58 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Amy Hempel.

Favorite Amy Hempel Quotes

1. "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. But the body moves toward health. The mind, too, in steps. One step at a time. Ask a mother who has just lost a child, How many children do you have? "Four," she will say, "—three," and years later, "Three," she will say, "—four." ~ Amy Hempel

2. "Women who are attacked phone a hotline for advice. "Don't report a rape," the women are told. "Call it indecent exposure. A guy who takes it out and doesn't do anything with it--cops figure that guys is sick." ~ Amy Hempel

3. "You will stand in line for snacks behind good clothes on bad bodies, behind the man who is so drunk he has lost his shoes, and so belligerent no one will help him find them." ~ Amy Hempel

4. "The psychic said I would have two children. This makes me shake my head. I know you are not supposed to leave a baby alone. Not even for a minute. But after a while I think, What could happen to a baby in the time it would take for me to run to the corner for a cappuccino on the go? So I do it, I run to the corner and get the cappuccino. And then I think how close the store is that is having the sale on leather gloves. Really, I think, it is only a couple of blocks. So I go to the store and buy the gloves. And it hits me--how long it has been since I have gone to a movie. A matinee! So I do that, too. I go to a movie. And when I come out of the theater it occurs to me that it has been years since I have been to Paris. Years. So I go to Paris, and come back three months later and find a skeleton in the crib." ~ Amy Hempel

5. "It is such a pretty story, told to me by a Cuban woman I met in a bar at the beach. She left the bar before I did; a drunken man took her place. He leaned into me and said, "I see in your dark eyes that you have suffered, and you have compassion, and I have suffered, and I have compassion, and I see in your eyes that I can say things to you--""My eyes are blue," I said." ~ Amy Hempel

6. "I sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see by its level if the coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking is still me." ~ Amy Hempel

7. "For example, the questions that say, "Would you prefer..." "Would you prefer (a) Answer questions about what you do, (b) Answer questions about what you know, (c) Answer questions about what you think?My answer is "Depends." But it's not one of the choices. I am having to think in terms of Always, Sometimes, Never." ~ Amy Hempel

8. "Tutto quello che ho fatto con te era amore." ~ Amy Hempel

9. "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

10. "It was like that class at school where the teacher talks about Realization, about how you could realize something big in a commonplace thing. The example he gave--and the liar said it really happened--was that once while drinking orange juice, he'd realized he would be dead someday. He wondered if we, his students, had had similar 'realizations.'Is he kidding? I thought.Once I cashed a paycheck and I realized it wasn't enough.Once I had food poisoning, and realized I was trapped inside my body." ~ Amy Hempel

11. "They say the smart dog obeys but the smarter dog knows when to disobey." ~ Amy Hempel

12. "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

13. "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

14. "I probably have less revision than those who have that wonderful rush of story to tell - you know, I can't wait to tell you what happened the other day. It comes tumbling out and maybe then they go back and refine. I kind of envy that way of working, but I just have never done it." ~ Amy Hempel

15. "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

16. "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." ~ Amy Hempel

17. "Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?" ~ Amy Hempel

18. "Dreams: the place most of us get what we need." ~ Amy Hempel

19. "I had my own bed. I slept in it alone, except for those times when we needed—not sex—but sex was how we got there." ~ Amy Hempel

20. "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

21. "I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be." ~ Amy Hempel

22. "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

23. "I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence." ~ Amy Hempel

24. "I get rational when I panic." ~ Amy Hempel

25. "I thought, my love is so good, why isn't it calling the same thing back." ~ Amy Hempel

26. "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

27. "It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it." ~ Amy Hempel

28. "Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber thinking it was zucchini. That's the kind of thing that turns my heart right over." ~ Amy Hempel

29. "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

30. "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

31. "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

32. "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

33. "When the beer is gone, so are they -- flexing their cars on up the boulevard." ~ Amy Hempel

34. "And I see that not touching for so long was a drive to the beach with the windows rolled up so the waves feel that much colder." ~ Amy Hempel

35. "Mrs. Linden was beautiful in spirit and in fact. Her wish, she told her daughter, was to be a beautiful woman and surprise people because she was a beautiful woman who was kind." ~ Amy Hempel

36. "I am not quite myself, I think.But who here is quite himself? And yet there is a way in which we are all more ourselves than ever, I suppose." ~ Amy Hempel

37. "And it was the first time that I believed the claim that you can help a person more by asking them the right question than by giving them the answer." ~ Amy Hempel

38. "We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive." ~ Amy Hempel

39. "A famous artist is approached by a student. "You don't remember me," the student says correctly, "but years ago you said something that changed my life. You said, 'Photography is death.' After that," says the student, "I threw out my camera. I began again. I want to thank you for changing my life.""Leave me alone," says the artist. "Photography is life." ~ Amy Hempel

40. "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

41. "A five-hour flight works out to three days and nights on land, by rail, from sea to shining sea. You can chalk off the hours on the back of the seat ahead. But seventy-some hours will not seem so long to you if you tell yourself first: This is where I am going to be for the rest of my natural life." ~ Amy Hempel

42. "E penso a quel detto che ripetono sempre tutti: "la vita è dura... e poi muori". A dire il vero, non è affatto così. Questo lo dicono loro. La vita è dura: su questo hanno ragione. Ma quei giorni che dovrebbero essere la parte peggiore? Su questo si sbagliano. E' la tua vita, il resto della tua vita, la parte peggiore." ~ Amy Hempel

43. "Mi immaginavo noi due che cuocevamo le mele per Natale, quegli stupidi quadretti romantici alla Currier e Ives... pensavo per tutto il tempo: A volte quello che abbiamo passa per amore, quando invece avrei dovuto pensare: L'amore passa." ~ Amy Hempel

44. "Alcuni di noi soffrono in silenzio di un male rumoroso. E questo è quanto ho da dire sulla paura." ~ Amy Hempel

45. "She introduces me to a nurse as the Best Friend. The impersonal article is more intimate. It tells me that they are intimate, the nurse and my friend.'I was telling her we used to drink Canada Dry ginger ale and pretend were were in Canada' 'That's how dumb we were,' I say. 'You could be sisters,' the nurse says. So how come, I'll bet they are wondering, it took me so long to get to such a glorious place? But do they ask? They do not ask. Two months, and how long is the drive? The best I can explain it is this - I have a friend who worked one summer in a mortuary. He used to tell me stories. The one that really got to me was not eh grisliest, but it's the one that did. A man wrecked his care on 101 going south. He did not lose consciousness. But his arm was taken down to the bone - and when he looked at it - it scared him to death. I mean, he died. So I hadn't dared to look any closer. But now I'm doing it - and hoping that I will live through it." ~ Amy Hempel

46. "I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me." ~ Amy Hempel

47. "What I think," Chatty says, "is that if a man loves a woman more than a woman loves a man, then they're even." ~ Amy Hempel

48. "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

49. "Before I took to the road, a friend tried to get me to go to a department store with him. He said it was to improve the place where I lived. He said," I want to know you are reading beneath this lamp. " This fellow was dying. He knew it and I did not. I think he was tucking me in. He was making sure all of his friends had the right lamps, the comfiest pillows, the softest sheets. He was tucking us all in for the night." ~ Amy Hempel

50. "consolation is a beautiful word. everyone skins his knee-that doesnt make yours hurt anyless." ~ Amy Hempel

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A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen."
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