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.
AIMEE BENDERHe 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.
More Aimee Bender Quotes
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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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I don’t think so, I don’t agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.
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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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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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It’s such a fraught and exciting and kind of horrible time.
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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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While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave.
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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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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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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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There’s a gift in your lap and it’s beautifully wrapped and it’s not your birthday.
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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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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 the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.
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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.
AIMEE BENDER






