Amy Hempel Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

The motto of this agency is We Never Knowingly Ruin Your Vacation.

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
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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
I don't get used to living at the beach, to seeing that wet horizon. It's the edge, the country's aisle seat.

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

Amy Hempel
He's a real teenager of a dog — if Boris didn't have whiskers, he'd have pimples.

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

Amy Hempel