Aimee Bender famous quotes

I want to be violated by insight.
-- Aimee Bender

#Want #Insight

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.
-- Aimee Bender

#Smart #Heart #Brain

It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moments.
-- Aimee Bender

#Moments #Rescue #Surprising

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.
-- Aimee Bender

#Strong #Kids #People

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.
-- Aimee Bender

#Dream #Writing #Awake

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

#Light #Yellow #Comfort

Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.
-- Aimee Bender

#Mom #Magazines #Pages

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.
-- Aimee Bender

#Wise #Wine #Eye

I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me, 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.
-- Aimee Bender

#Messages #Meals #Bottles

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.
-- Aimee Bender

#Light #Self #Hands

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 Bender

#Clothes #Dating #Skins

Mom loved my brother more. Not that she didn't love me - I felt the wash of her love every day, 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.
-- Aimee Bender

#Mom #Daughter #Brother

It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.
-- Aimee Bender

#Spring #Revealing

We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.
-- Aimee Bender

#Hands #World #Streets

When language is treated beautifully and interestingly, it can feel good for the body: It's nourishing; it's rejuvenating.
-- Aimee Bender

#Feel Good #Body #Language

Large meadows are lovely for picnics and romping, but they are for the lighter feelings. Meadows do not make me want to write.
-- Aimee Bender

#Writing #Feelings #Lovely

You can ruin anything if you focus at it.
-- Aimee Bender

#Focus #Ruins

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.
-- Aimee Bender

#Character #Plot #Tickets

I'm obsessed with adolescence. I love to write about people in their 20s. It's such a fraught and exciting and kind of horrible time.
-- Aimee Bender

#Writing #People #Kind

There's a gift in your lap and it's beautifully wrapped and it's not your birthday. 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.
-- Aimee Bender

#Thinking #Important #Lap

I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.
-- Aimee Bender

#Echoes

I give boring people something to discuss over corn.
-- Aimee Bender

#People #Giving #Corn

My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside. Amen." — Aimee Bender (Willful Creatures: Stories)
-- Aimee Bender

#Rope #Band #Stories

You're the perfect girl', he said, rubbing his chin. 'You expect nothing.
-- Aimee Bender

#Girl #Perfect #Expect Nothing

But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was candles, did she think she'd done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?
-- Aimee Bender

#Believe #Passion #Thinking

The wine glasses are empty except for that one undrinkable red spot at the bottom.
-- Aimee Bender

#Wine #Glasses #Red

My lover is experiencing reverse evolution.
-- Aimee Bender

#Lovers #Evolution #Reverse

I am the drying meadow; you the unspoken apology; he is the fluctuating distance between mother and son; 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 Bender

#Life #Mother #Baby

Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children... 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. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.
-- Aimee Bender

#Mother #Children #Thinking

...a Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.
-- Aimee Bender

#Doritos

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. 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

#Burgers #Littles #Handmade

To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.
-- Aimee Bender

#Gratitude #Someone You Love #Barometer

…kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.
-- Aimee Bender

#Kissing #Years #Littles

I didn’t mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.
-- Aimee Bender

#Ideas #Mind #Trying

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.
-- Aimee Bender

#Dark #Hands #Rooms

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...
-- Aimee Bender

#Writing #Pages #Best Work

I admired that stride; it was like he folded space in two with it.
-- Aimee Bender

#Two #Space #Stride

Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest.
-- Aimee Bender

#Struggle #Writing #Character

But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.
-- Aimee Bender

#Sky #Interesting

I felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.
-- Aimee Bender

#Taken #Paper #Fists

It is all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It's the mathematical logic of being alive. 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.
-- Aimee Bender

#Life #Sadness #Loss

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.
-- Aimee Bender

#Birthday #Cake #Childhood

That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother's palm and fingertips, 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.
-- Aimee Bender

#Mother #Air #Details

I could feel the tears beginning to collect in my throat again, but I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.
-- Aimee Bender

#Tears #Groups #Away From Each Other

I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.
-- Aimee Bender

#Space #Lines #Dots

I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q...
-- Aimee Bender

#Circles #Tails

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.
-- Aimee Bender

#Fire #Rooms #Cold

While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.
-- Aimee Bender

#Moving #Cutting #Simple

I don't think so, I don't agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.
-- Aimee Bender

#Thinking #Unbearable #Said

My eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.
-- Aimee Bender

#Caves #Want #Eyelids

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 Bender

#Daughter #Father #Language

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. 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.
-- Aimee Bender

#Running #Blow #Space