Amy Hempel Quotes

We have all lost touch with life, we all limp, each to a greater or lesser degree.

Sometimes I wonder where I am from. I am either way ahead or I come from another world. I don't recognise this world.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

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.

Pero yo ya no soy yo Ni mi casa es ya mi casa. But now I am no longer I, nor is my house any longer my house.

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.

I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person

I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it — and I'm sure I can't tell you whether the fate's good or evil. I don't die — I don't fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I'm just not there.

All of a sudden I didn't fit in anywhere. Not at school, not at home...and every time I turned around, another person I'd known forever felt like a stranger to me. Even I felt like a stranger to me.

I didn't feel like I was in my own body; my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing.

I don't really feel part of any particular movement.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

At Yves Saint Laurent, I felt like the son-in-law - like I was part of the family, but not quite. When I was fired, I felt like the widow.

I don't think you ever know in yourself whether you have gone mad. You exist in a bubble. There comes a point where you suddenly feel not really a part of the world, you're just passing through.

I think fractures in your childhood make you observe the world more as an outsider. Possibly it pushes you outside.

I saw the dead without really seeing them.

Most of my films seem to be about people bewildered by the world around them, who don't fit into it and are trying to understand it.

A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.

Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist.

I belong nowhere and to no one.

In Mumbai, I feel like a stranger.

Sometimes I'm not into being a human.

I don't associate myself with anything. I don't associate myself with where I'm from or where I am.