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.
AIMEE BENDERIt 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.
More Aimee Bender Quotes
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I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.
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That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.
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But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.
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Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.
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My eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.
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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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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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The most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.
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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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I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.
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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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We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.
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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 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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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