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.
AIMEE BENDERMy genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside. Amen.” – Aimee Bender (Willful Creatures: Stories)
More Aimee Bender Quotes
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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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Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn’t appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.
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We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.
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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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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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Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children…
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I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q…
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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.
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You’re the perfect girl’, he said, rubbing his chin. ‘You expect nothing.
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You can ruin anything if you focus at it.
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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.
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You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground.
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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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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.
AIMEE BENDER