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.
AIMEE BENDERI am the drying meadow; you the unspoken apology; he is the fluctuating distance between mother and son.
More Aimee Bender Quotes
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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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It is all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It’s the mathematical logic of being alive.
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And the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?
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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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We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.
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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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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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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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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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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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As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.
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We’re all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there’s too much thought and not enough heart.
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A Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.
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But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.
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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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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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You’re the perfect girl’, he said, rubbing his chin. ‘You expect nothing.
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I give boring people something to discuss over corn.
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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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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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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 knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me,
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My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside. Amen.” – Aimee Bender (Willful Creatures: Stories)
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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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This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed than they were when they came in. Nobody cooked that burger.
AIMEE BENDER