It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.
AIMEE BENDERThat she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.
More Aimee Bender Quotes
-
-
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.
AIMEE BENDER -
We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.
AIMEE BENDER -
That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother’s palm and fingertips.
AIMEE BENDER -
While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave.
AIMEE BENDER -
With my hand in his, I looked at all the apartment buildings with rushes of love, peering in the wide streetside windows that revealed living rooms painted in dark burgandies and matte reds.
AIMEE BENDER -
She is the first gesture that creates a quiet that is full enough to make the baby sleep. My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside. Amen.
AIMEE BENDER -
I don’t think so, I don’t agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.
AIMEE BENDER -
I admired that stride; it was like he folded space in two with it.
AIMEE BENDER -
I’m obsessed with adolescence. I love to write about people in their 20s.
AIMEE BENDER -
If everything kept to its normal progression, we would live with the sadness-cry and then walk-but what really breaks us cleanest are the losses that happen out of order.
AIMEE BENDER -
But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.
AIMEE BENDER -
It’s a pleasure to dive into Hirshberg’s storytelling skills in American Morons.
AIMEE BENDER -
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.
AIMEE BENDER -
But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think?
AIMEE BENDER -
I felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.
AIMEE BENDER -
It’s such a fraught and exciting and kind of horrible time.
AIMEE BENDER -
The writing I tend to think of as ‘good’ is good because it’s mysterious.
AIMEE BENDER -
But 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.
AIMEE BENDER -
You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground.
AIMEE BENDER -
That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.
AIMEE BENDER -
When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.
AIMEE BENDER -
I give boring people something to discuss over corn.
AIMEE BENDER -
We’re all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there’s too much thought and not enough heart.
AIMEE BENDER -
and I get refill number three or four and the wine is making my bones loose and it’s giving my hair a red sheen and my breasts are blooming and my eyes feel sultry and wise and the dress is water.
AIMEE BENDER -
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.
AIMEE BENDER -
You’re the perfect girl’, he said, rubbing his chin. ‘You expect nothing.
AIMEE BENDER