Top 63 Amy Hempel Quotes
#1. When she sees him, Holly says, it's like the sunsets at the beach
once the sun drops, the sand chills quickly. Then it's like a lot of times that were good ten minutes ago and don't count now.
Amy Hempel
#2. I believe that 99 percent of what anyone does can effectively be postponed.
Amy Hempel
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Consolation is a beautiful word. everyone skins his knee-that doesnt make yours hurt anyless.
Amy Hempel
#6. 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
#7. They say the smart dog obeys but the smarter dog knows when to disobey.
Amy Hempel
#8. When the beer is gone, so are they
flexing their cars on up the boulevard.
Amy Hempel
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.
Amy Hempel
#12. It's the natural trajectory of a writing career that a writer becomes better at being herself.
Amy Hempel
#13. Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.
Amy Hempel
#14. I'm not good at small talk; I'm not good at big talk; and medium talk just doesn't come up.
Amy Hempel
#15. The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.
Amy Hempel
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. When my mother died, my father's early widowhood gave him social cachet he would not have had if they had divorced. He was a bigger catch for the sorrow attached.
Amy Hempel
#19. I think it was that love that I loved. That kind of involvement was reassuring; I felt it would extend to me, as well. That it did not or that it did, but only as much and no more, was confusing at first.
Amy Hempel
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.
Amy Hempel
#23. I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry.
Amy Hempel
#24. I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.
Amy Hempel
#25. There's no such thing as luck. Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.
Amy Hempel
#26. It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.
Amy Hempel
#27. 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
#28. For peace of mind, I will lie about any thing at any time.
Amy Hempel
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.
Amy Hempel
#33. 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
#34. A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
Amy Hempel
#35. I meet a person, and in my mind I'm saying three minutes; I give you three minutes to show me the spark.
Amy Hempel
#36. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.
Amy Hempel
#37. He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.
Amy Hempel
#38. 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
#39. I am so suggestible. When Chatty asks if I am hungry, I say, "I could be." I would try to become the woman you wanted without even knowing I was trying. As it is, I am barely the woman I am.
Amy Hempel
#40. I thought, my love is so good, why isn't it calling the same thing back.
Amy Hempel
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. My job ... I do nothing, it pays nothing, but - you guessed it - it's better than nothing.
Amy Hempel
#44. I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story.
Amy Hempel
#45. Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.
Amy Hempel
#46. Tell me things I won't mind forgetting, she said. 'Make it useless stuff or skip it.
Amy Hempel
#47. I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true - nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
Amy Hempel
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. An idea might spark an essay, but never a story.
Amy Hempel
#51. 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
#52. I could claim any number of high-flown reasons for writing, just as you can explain certain dogs behavior ... But maybe, it's that they're dog, and that's what dogs do.
Amy Hempel
#53. I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.
Amy Hempel
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.
Amy Hempel
#58. Just once in my life
oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?
Amy Hempel
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater.
Amy Hempel
#63. Here is what you do. You ease yourself into a tub of water, you ease yourself down. You lie back and wait for the ripples to smooth away. Then you take a deep breath, and slide your head under, and listen for the playfulness of your heart.
Amy Hempel
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