The Collected Stories

by Amy Hempel

“A blind date is coming to pick me up, and unless my hair grows an inch by seven o’clock, I am not going to answer the door.”

“I leave a lot out when I tell the truth. The same when I write a story.

“Not everything I know is something I want to see. Though on highways, and, once, on a mountain road, I have strained to see things I didn’t want to see.

Hempel both wants to believe (there is the unbidden tolling of religious language in these stories), and hates the gobbledygook of anything but flesh.

just because you have stopped sinking doesn’t mean you’re not still underwater.

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

I get rational when I panic.

99 percent of what anyone does can effectively be postponed.

Maybe I wasn’t losing everything. But I didn’t try to save it.

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

he married the most beautiful woman he ever saw and learned the irrelevance of beauty.

You think you’re safe, the father thought, but it’s thinking you’re invisible because you closed your eyes.

“Dots is spots up close. Spots is dots far away.”

“I’m exaggerating so you can get to know me faster.”

Life is tough—they got that right. But what about those first three days being the worst? They’re wrong about that part. It’s your life—it’s the rest of your life that’s the worst.

Jean said, “Men.” She said, “They hate you at first. But all you have to do is be funny and sad and tall and thin and short and fat and wear them down, wear them down.”