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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 The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (2006)

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More quotes by Amy Hempel

"There is no friction here. It's a kind and buoyant place. What you forget, living here, is that just because you have stopped sinking doesn't mean you're not still underwater."

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?

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!

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.

The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (2006)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Amy Hempel (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.