That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother’s palm and fingertips.
AIMEE BENDERMy eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.
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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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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I am the drying meadow; you the unspoken apology; he is the fluctuating distance between mother and son.
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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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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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You feel wonderful, you feel like somebody knows you’re alive, you feel fear because it could be a bomb, because you think you’re that important.
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I give boring people something to discuss over corn.
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I didn’t mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.
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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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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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As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.
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You can ruin anything if you focus at it.
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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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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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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