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.
AIMEE BENDERThe 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.
More Aimee Bender Quotes
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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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I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q…
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It’s such a fraught and exciting and kind of horrible time.
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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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A Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.
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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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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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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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Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.
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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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Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.
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I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.
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I’m obsessed with adolescence. I love to write about people in their 20s.
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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 didn’t mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.
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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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Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.
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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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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 the drying meadow; you the unspoken apology; he is the fluctuating distance between mother and son.
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My lover is experiencing reverse evolution.
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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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Glen Hirshberg’s stories are haunting, absolutely, but not only because of the content.
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The wine glasses are empty except for that one undrinkable red spot at the bottom.
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It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moments.
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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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