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.
AIMEE BENDERNot getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles.
More Aimee Bender Quotes
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Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.
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Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children…
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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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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.
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As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.
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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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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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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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When language is treated beautifully and interestingly, it can feel good for the body: It’s nourishing; it’s rejuvenating.
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You can ruin anything if you focus at it.
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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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This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed than they were when they came in. Nobody cooked that burger.
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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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It’s a pleasure to dive into Hirshberg’s storytelling skills in American Morons.
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I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q…
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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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Kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.
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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 watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.
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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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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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I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.
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Large meadows are lovely for picnics and romping, but they are for the lighter feelings. Meadows do not make me want to write.
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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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