Amy Hempel Quotes & Sayings

I told him about the way they get to know you. Not the way people do, the way they flatter you by wanting to know every last thing about you, only it isn't a compliment, it is just efficient, a person getting more quickly to the end of you. Correction - dogs do want to know every last thing about you. They take in the smell of you, they know from the next room, asleep, when a mood settles over you. The difference is there's not an end to it. — Amy Hempel

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. — Amy Hempel

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

I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me. — Amy Hempel

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

I get rational when I panic. — Amy Hempel

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

I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry. — Amy Hempel

What seems dangerous often is not - black snakes, for example, or clear-air turbulence. While things that just lie there, like this beach, are loaded with jeopardy. A yellow dust rising from the ground, the heat that ripens melons overnight - this is earthquake weather. You can sit here braiding the fringe on your towel and the sand will all of a sudden suck down like an hourglass. The air roars. In the cheap apartments onshore, bathtubs fill themselves and gardens roll up and over like green waves. If nothing happens, the dust will drift and the heat deepen till fear turns to desire. Nerves like that are only bought off by catastrophe. — Amy Hempel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm not good at small talk; I'm not good at big talk; and medium talk just doesn't come up. — Amy Hempel

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

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

I believe that 99 percent of what anyone does can effectively be postponed. — Amy Hempel

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

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

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

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

Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive. — Amy Hempel

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

I know when a story is finished when there is not a single thing more I can think to do to it. And since I know at the start what the last line will be, I know when I've reached that point as logically as I can that it's finished. As for the rewriting-it's not foolproof, of course, but if you're honest about having thought of every possibility and you still come back to what you have, what more can you do? — Amy Hempel

Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare. — Amy Hempel

I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story. — Amy Hempel

When the beer is gone, so are they
flexing their cars on up the boulevard. — Amy Hempel

And what about the certainty I feel regarding you? You could say that an hour is not a lot to go on. But always, before, a thing didn't work because I was too young and too old. Too dumb and too smart. But I learn from my mistakes. The certainty I feel
it is something to hit back with. So in a manner of speaking, I now have a stick bigger than the stick I was beaten with.
Except let's not think of it as something larger of the same type. Maybe, instead of a stick, it just looks like a stick. Maybe it is really a snake. And it moves like a river. Maybe it is a river, and we can go someplace on it, someplace new. — Amy Hempel

It's the natural trajectory of a writing career that a writer becomes better at being herself. — Amy Hempel

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

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

Consolation is a beautiful word. everyone skins his knee-that doesnt make yours hurt anyless. — Amy Hempel

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

He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them. — Amy Hempel

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

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

For peace of mind, I will lie about any thing at any time. — Amy Hempel

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

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

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

I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. — Amy Hempel

Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed. — Amy Hempel

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

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

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

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

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

They say the smart dog obeys but the smarter dog knows when to disobey. — Amy Hempel

Just once in my life
oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life? — Amy Hempel

There's no such thing as luck. Luck is where preparation meets opportunity. — Amy Hempel

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

My job ... I do nothing, it pays nothing, but - you guessed it - it's better than nothing. — Amy Hempel

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

An idea might spark an essay, but never a story. — Amy Hempel

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

I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself. — Amy Hempel

Just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater. — Amy Hempel

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

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

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

The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me. — Amy Hempel

The neighborhood drug dealer kicks out his wife. He moves in a girlfriend and the wife finds out. The wife lets herself back into the house and steals a hundred thousand dollars that the drug dealer can't report missing. The drug dealer's wife goes to India, where she sends her husband a cable: The people here are poor so I gave them all your money. — Amy Hempel

Dreams: the place most of us get what we need. — Amy Hempel

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

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

Tell me things I won't mind forgetting, she said. 'Make it useless stuff or skip it. — Amy Hempel

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

In my head there's a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak. — Amy Hempel

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

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

Pretty soon three sleeping bags formed a triangle in the master bedroom. The father was the hypotenuse. The girl asked him to brush out her hair, which he did while the boy ate a tangerine, peeling it up close to his face, inhaling the mist. Then he held each segment to the light to find seeds. In his lap, cat paws fluttered like dreaming eyes. What — Amy Hempel

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

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

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign her newborn.
Baby, drink milk.
Baby, play ball.
And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief. — Amy Hempel