The writing I tend to think of as ‘good’ is good because it’s mysterious.
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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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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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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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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Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles.
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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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It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things.
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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.
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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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I’m obsessed with adolescence. I love to write about people in their 20s.
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That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother’s palm and fingertips.
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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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That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.
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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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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