Quotes from 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.

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

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

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

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

I meet a person, and in my mind I'm saying three minutes; I give you three minutes to show me the spark.

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

Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?

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

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.

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.

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

I get rational when I panic.

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

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

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

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?

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 .

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.

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

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

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

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!

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.