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.
AIMEE BENDERWhen language is treated beautifully and interestingly, it can feel good for the body: It’s nourishing; it’s rejuvenating.
More Aimee Bender Quotes
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The wine glasses are empty except for that one undrinkable red spot at the bottom.
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You feel wonderful, you feel like somebody knows you’re alive, you feel fear because it could be a bomb, because you think you’re that important.
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Mom loved my brother more. Not that she didn’t love me – I felt the wash of her love every day.
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I’m obsessed with adolescence. I love to write about people in their 20s.
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He was also removing all traces of any tiny leftover parts, and suddenly a ritual which I’d always found incestuous and gross seemed to me more like a desperate act on Joseph’s part to get out, to leave, to extract every little last remnant and bring it into open air.
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It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we’d read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.
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Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children…
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Large meadows are lovely for picnics and romping, but they are for the lighter feelings. Meadows do not make me want to write.
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But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.
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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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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 felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.
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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.
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You can ruin anything if you focus at it.
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As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.
AIMEE BENDER