I admired that stride; it was like he folded space in two with it.
AIMEE BENDERShe is the first gesture that creates a quiet that is full enough to make the baby sleep. My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside. Amen.
More Aimee Bender Quotes
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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 seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.
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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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That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.
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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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Pouring over me, but it was a different kind, siphoned from a different, and tamer, body of water. I was her darling daughter; Joseph was her it.
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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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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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I am the drying meadow; you the unspoken apology; he is the fluctuating distance between mother and son.
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She is the first gesture that creates a quiet that is full enough to make the baby sleep. My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside. Amen.
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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 watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.
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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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Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.
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When language is treated beautifully and interestingly, it can feel good for the body: It’s nourishing; it’s rejuvenating.
AIMEE BENDER