While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave.
AIMEE BENDERYou’re the perfect girl’, he said, rubbing his chin. ‘You expect nothing.
More Aimee Bender Quotes
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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 like birthday cake. It’s so symbolic. It’s a tempting symbol to load with something more complicated than just ‘Happy birthday!’ because it’s this emblem of childhood and a happy day.
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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 am the drying meadow; you the unspoken apology; he is the fluctuating distance between mother and son.
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I admired that stride; it was like he folded space in two with it.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Glen Hirshberg’s stories are haunting, absolutely, but not only because of the content.
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You’re the perfect girl’, he said, rubbing his chin. ‘You expect nothing.
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Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.
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It’s a pleasure to dive into Hirshberg’s storytelling skills in American Morons.
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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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That’s the thing with handmade items. They still have the person’s mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone.
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But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.
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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.
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I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.
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You can ruin anything if you focus at it.
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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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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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You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground.
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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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There’s a gift in your lap and it’s beautifully wrapped and it’s not your birthday.
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Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children…
AIMEE BENDER