Top 60 Amy Hempel Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There’s no such thing as luck. Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.”

— Amy Hempel

2. “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

3. “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

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

— Amy Hempel

5. “Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive.”

— Amy Hempel

6. “Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.”

— Amy Hempel

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

— Amy Hempel

8. “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

9. “I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.”

— Amy Hempel

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

— Amy Hempel

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

— Amy Hempel

12. “Just once in my life – oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?”

— Amy Hempel

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

— Amy Hempel

14. “I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it’s true – nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.”

— Amy Hempel

15. “Just because you have stopped sinking doesn’t mean you’re not still underwater.”

— Amy Hempel

16. “I leave a lot out when I tell the truth.”

— Amy Hempel

17. “I’m not good at small talk; I’m not good at big talk; and medium talk just doesn’t come up.”

— Amy Hempel

18. “In my head there’s a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.”

— Amy Hempel

19. “I remember thinking: There will never come a time when I will not be thinking of this. And I was right. And I was wrong.”

— Amy Hempel

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

27. “A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.”

— Amy Hempel

28. “I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry.”

— Amy Hempel

29. “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

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. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “I thought, my love is so good, why isn’t it calling the same thing back.”

— Amy Hempel

35. “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

36. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

37. “What you forget, living here, is that just because you have stopped sinking doesn’t mean you’re not still underwater.”

— Amy Hempel

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

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

— Amy Hempel

42. “He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good.”

— Amy Hempel

43. “I’m just headin’ off the coast aimlessly. I haven’t had much impact. Nothing but depression. Tropical, but nonetheless, depression. Headin’ out to sea.”

— Amy Hempel

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

— Amy Hempel

45. “When the beer is gone, so are they – flexing their cars on up the boulevard.”

— Amy Hempel

46. “I get rational when I panic.”

— Amy Hempel

47. “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

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

— Amy Hempel

49. “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

50. “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