Amy Hempel > Quotes

“I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.”
― Amy Hempel

“We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“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, The Collected Stories

“ 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, The Collected Stories

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

“Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?”
― Amy Hempel, The Dog of the Marriage: Stories

“Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“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, The Collected Stories

“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, The Collected Stories

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

“I get rational when I panic.”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.”
― Amy Hempel, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom

“I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.”
― Amy Hempel

“I thought, my love is so good, why isn't it calling the same thing back.”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“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, The Collected Stories

“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, The Collected Stories

“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, The Collected Stories

“I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“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, Tumble Home: A Novella and Short Stories

“He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.”
― Amy Hempel, Reasons to Live

“They say the smart dog obeys but the smarter dog knows when to disobey.”
― 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

“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 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, The Collected Stories

“consolation is a beautiful word. everyone skins his knee-that doesnt make yours hurt anyless.”
― Amy Hempel

“He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“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, Reasons to Live

“Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.”
― Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

“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, The Collected Stories