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.
Interpretation
This quote reflects a deep awareness of one's environment and emotional state, using the glass of water as a metaphor for sensitivity to both nature and personal turmoil.
In this quote, Amy Hempel expresses a profound connection between the physical world and her internal feelings. The glass of water symbolizes clarity and perception; its level indicates either the tremors of the earth or the disturbances within her own mind. This interplay suggests how our emotional states can be intertwined with external realities, prompting introspection about the nature of one's existence and the duality of perception.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about mindfulness and awareness of one's surroundings.
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.
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.
if it's true your life flashes past your eyes before you die, then it is also the truth that your life rushes forth when you are ready to start to truly be alive.
But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.
It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in many things more restraint and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason.
Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective
We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.
A Baby Sermon- The lighting and thunder, they go and they come: But the stars and the stillness are always at home
One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
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