I’m obsessed with adolescence. I love to write about people in their 20s.
AIMEE BENDERBut I loved George in part because he believed me; because if I stood in a cold, plain room and yelled FIRE, he would walk over and ask me why.
More Aimee Bender Quotes
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I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn’t sustain my interest.
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As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.
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Pouring over me, but it was a different kind, siphoned from a different, and tamer, body of water. I was her darling daughter; Joseph was her it.
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As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.
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But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think?
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Kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.
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It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moments.
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Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles.
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I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.
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But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.
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Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows.
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Before she knew it was candles, did she think she’d done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips.
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When language is treated beautifully and interestingly, it can feel good for the body: It’s nourishing; it’s rejuvenating.
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The stories themselves haunt, they stick around, they linger, inhabiting a little corner of the reader’s brain and resurfacing to evoke mystery or sadness or longing.
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I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me,
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It’s such a fraught and exciting and kind of horrible time.
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It was a fleeting statement, one I didn’t think she’d hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us.
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I am not happy, help me — like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message.
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I peeled the skin off a grape in slippery little triangles, and I understood then that I would be undressing every item of food I could because my clothes would be staying on.
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You’re the perfect girl’, he said, rubbing his chin. ‘You expect nothing.
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Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.
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I want to be violated by insight.
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The wine glasses are empty except for that one undrinkable red spot at the bottom.
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I don’t think so, I don’t agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.
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And the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?
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Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children…
AIMEE BENDER