The writing I tend to think of as ‘good’ is good because it’s mysterious.
AIMEE BENDERIt 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.
More Aimee Bender Quotes
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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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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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I give boring people something to discuss over corn.
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It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.
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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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Kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.
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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 felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.
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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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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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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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I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q…
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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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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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Before she knew it was candles, did she think she’d done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips.
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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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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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My eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.
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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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It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moments.
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Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.
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When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.
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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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I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn’t sustain my interest.
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Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles.
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