Amy Hempel Quotes

I hit rock bottom, but thank God my bottom wasn't death.

Everyone has a rock bottom.

I had a motorcycle accident, and I had my garage burn down with most of my vehicles. And I've had really bad relationships that I've been in and out of. They've left their mark.

I can't imagine trying to be in recovery. I mean it would be hard enough with just life going along in a nice way, but then when awful stuff happens, how you maintain the strength to get through it?

In the morning, we carry the world like Atlas; at noon, we stoop and bend beneath it; and at night, it crushes us flat to the ground.

Most people overcome something terrible at some point in their lives.

I was very lucky that I didn't end up a basket case.

At times it is not easy for me to take up living again.

I'm by no means a perfect human being. I experience more than half of my life perpetuating darkness. That was because I was dropped in a place of darkness and expected to find a way out.

Life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.

The worst is over without a doubt.

I've been through hell. It's hard to think you have this life, and then all of a sudden - was it a lie? You're struggling because it wasn't real. But I survived. It was hard, but it didn't kill me.

Any addict in recovery would say that life never becomes perfect. Your life is better, but that doesn't mean it's easier. Life, at least for a certain period of time, becomes harder and you have to work through that to get to the light at the end of the tunnel.

Adversity is a good test of our resiliency, our ability to cope, to stand back up, to recover from misfortune. Adversity is a painful pedagogue.

I think maybe everyone falls... I think the asking is whether we get back up again.

I've seen a lot in my life, and everybody goes down the dark, winding staircase eventually. It's a bad place to be and that's why having good friends is always essential. Those are the people who pull you out.

Mostly everything gets worse before it gets better.

Do you sometimes feel that you just can't take one more thing? Even in your misery, be mindful that the very weight of your burdens and the intensity going to use in your life to trigger an experience of personal revival.

I'd had my share of rain. My mother's illness ... had weighed on me, but the years before had been heavy, too. I was only twenty eight.

The good news is that by the second year, those cravings were about as half as frequent, and by the third year, half as much again. I'm still a little bent, a little crooked, but all things crooked, I can't complain. After all those years of all kinds of abuse and crashing into trees at eighty miles an hour and jumping off buildings and living through overdoses and liver disease, I feel better now than I did ten years ago. I might have some scar tissue, but that's alright, I'm still making progress.

I've been beaten, I've been bruised, I was left for dead as well.

The one who doesn't fall, doesn't stand up.

No one is beat till he quits, no one is through till he stops. No matter how hard failure hits, no matter how often he drops, a fellow's not down till he lies in the dust and refuses to rise.

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

I am struggling, though. It’s f-cking hard. So little sleep. It’s 23 hours and 59 minutes of exhaustion. They do one little thing in that last minute that is just so compelling and fascinating that it makes the other 23 hours and 59 minutes worthwhile.