Aimee Bender Quotes

26 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aimee Bender