Top 100 Aimee Bender Quotes
#1. She looked over my shoulder once while I was texting, which was already annoying, and when I wrote lol she made a very clear point to me about how I was silent and not laughing out loud, not at all. I said it was just an expression, and that I was laughing out loud inside my own mind.
Aimee Bender
#2. Then he sat down at the table of a larger man, a man with tattoos but the old kind, before tattoos became dainty and about spiritual life. The man wore tattoos from the time when tattoos meant you liked to kick people around.
Aimee Bender
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. I noticed, when I taught elementary school, how true the squeaky wheel thing is, and how endearing squeaky wheels can be! Because when you're being a squeaky wheel, you're also really letting people know who you are.
Aimee Bender
#6. He said, I always thought the woman I'd marry would hit me easy, in a bolt of lightning, and there is not lightning there is not even thunder there is not even rain.
Aimee Bender
#7. They'd been married for years, and he wanted her to give up the last thread of cover so she would stand before him nude and he could make love to her entire skin. Well, of course that made her head fall off. Of course.
Aimee Bender
#8. Sherrie would be there, and the last time I'd seen her at a social event she burst into tears when she saw me and ran out of the room. You're upset, I'd yelled after her, meanly.
Aimee Bender
#9. She could feel it brimming on her lips, that superstar smile, the bow shape, the teeth long and solid tombstones.
Aimee Bender
#10. 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
#11. It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what's happened.
Aimee Bender
#13. We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.
Aimee Bender
#14. Granted, I'm someone who loves words. I've always loved poetry - so it's suited to me.
Aimee Bender
#15. It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.
Aimee Bender
#16. The address label wouldn't come off so I put the ripped electric bill back in its stack by the phone. On top of all the other bills, all the papers that ran the house invisibly
Aimee Bender
#17. At lunch you order steamed vegetables because you're remembering that you have a heart too. You feel humbled by your heart, it works so hard. You want to thank it. You give your heart a little pat
Aimee Bender
#18. I have trouble describing my own style, since it's sort of like describing my own eye color or something.
Aimee Bender
#20. I love all the arts - so museums, theatre, music, walks near trees or by the ocean, time with people, psychological readings.
Aimee Bender
#21. Dad lost his job. Then he got a new job. Then he got his old job back and went back to it. They were all in the same building.
Aimee Bender
#23. I think it's good to smile at everybody so that everyone knows you love everyone. It's good for human pacifism.
Aimee Bender
#24. Ponytail girl leaned over and she and the tall boy kissed and it was carcinogen gums and magical.
Aimee Bender
#25. But the rest of the evening is nothing but the trembling edges of something I am so tired of feeling and I do not want to feel anymore.
Aimee Bender
#26. 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
#27. There was love to be felt, and discovered, still.
Aimee Bender
#28. [ ... ]when he closed his eyes, the torrent of longing waiting inside was so thick he thought he might drown in it.
Aimee Bender
#29. To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.
Aimee Bender
#30. I give boring people something to discuss over corn.
Aimee Bender
#31. I think teaching keeps me honest because if I'm up in front of a class talking about what I think is important about fiction while knowing I myself have just failed to do that hours earlier at my computer - it's a good and humbling reminder.
Aimee Bender
#32. I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.
Aimee Bender
#33. When language is treated beautifully and interestingly, it can feel good for the body: It's nourishing; it's rejuvenating.
Aimee Bender
#34. In general, I call her every night, and we talk for an hour, which is forty-five minutes of me, and fifteen minutes of her stirring her tea, which she steeps with the kind of Zen patience that would make Buddhists sit up in envy and then breathe through their envy and then move past their envy.
Aimee Bender
#35. At readings, audience members sometimes ask if I keep writing past the two hours if I'm on a roll, but I don't. I figure that if I'm on a roll, it's partially because I know I'm about to stop.
Aimee Bender
#36. I will never die, thought the cake to itself, in even simpler terms, as cakes did not have sophisticated use of language.
Aimee Bender
#37. I'd stopped waving to passengers in cars by then- I'd grown suspicious of people and all the complications of interior lives- so I sat and watched and rode and thought, and as soon as the bus doors opened, we all rolled out the doorand split apart like billiard balls.
Aimee Bender
#38. One thing I don't want to feel is marketplace pressure, so I'm really glad I enjoy teaching because I can rely on that for a salary. I think it would be such a different game if I had to write a book that has to sell well.
Aimee Bender
#39. 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
#40. As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.
Aimee Bender
#41. For me as a person, friendships are incredibly important to me, but in writing, they can distract me.
Aimee Bender
#42. Several of the girls at the party had had sex, something which sounded appealing but only if it could happen with blindfolds in a time warp plus amnesia
Aimee Bender
#43. With hand gestures, you can fill in a lot of gaps, and the words thing and stuff and -ness also help: patientness instead of patience, fastness instead of speed, honestness instead of honesty. With these choices, many words can be indicated, and pointing or gesticulating usually works.
Aimee Bender
#44. She thought of how she had never sat and had a long conversation with her father because he, too, refused to talk about himself. "Someone else should speak instead," he said. "If I don't speak, it means someone else will," which did not always turn out to be true.
Aimee Bender
#45. YOU'RE IN MY MOUTH, I said. GET OUT OF MY MOUTH.
Aimee Bender
#46. I didn't mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.
Aimee Bender
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. I just like the feeling of finding the right word in my mind and employing it. I get pleasure from that feeling. I prefer language to gesture. I figured other people might, too.
Aimee Bender
#51. Last day I saw him human, he was sad about the world.
Aimee Bender
#52. But truthfully? Let me tell you what I honestly think.
I think, maybe he hasn't even noticed that I'm gone.
But. I have.
Aimee Bender
#53. 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
#54. I love the idea of numerology, but I don't really believe in it. But I like thinking about what numbers convey.
Aimee Bender
#55. Her blush was the color of a coral reef, but smooth.
Aimee Bender
#56. The world can ask you to participate, but it's a day-today decision if you want to agree to that proposal.
Aimee Bender
#57. The writing I tend to think of as 'good' is good because it's mysterious.
Aimee Bender
#58. 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
#59. I admired that stride; it was like he folded space in two with it.
Aimee Bender
#60. Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.
Aimee Bender
#61. ... kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.
Aimee Bender
#62. Most teenage girls don't give old people the time of day which is sad because all old people do all the time is think about how nice it was to be a teenager so long ago.
Aimee Bender
#63. There's a spectrum of those moments of connection and the moments we fail to connect, going from super-large successes to failures. Success would be love, I guess, and failure could still be love, but the bad side; and loss.
Aimee Bender
#64. I don't think so, I don't agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.
Aimee Bender
#65. It was the kind of conversation you could only hold in whispers.
Aimee Bender
#66. By her estimation, the woman had probably been five years old during the height of the war. Listening to panicked voices in the next room. The majority of the living memories now owned by then-children.
Aimee Bender
#67. This woman he met was the woman he met and however you try, you cannot unmeet.
Aimee Bender
#68. 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
#69. But the fact was, Sherrie Marla trusted him already. When he took the ice off, and showed to her his new symmetry, she didn't flinch. His face was him to her now. It was not a map or an indicator of some abstract idea. Turned out it was only the first impression he needed to alter.
Aimee Bender
#70. She was tired these days because she was having job trouble too; her trouble meant she did not know how she could be useful in her life. Dad's job trouble was he had too much to do with his life. Sometimes I just wanted them to even it out but I couldn't think of how.
Aimee Bender
#71. My lover is experiencing reverse evolution.
Aimee Bender
#72. I really like feeling connected to people and feeling like I have a good, solid sense of empathy.
Aimee Bender
#73. An old man with overalls walked by; I don't think old people should wear overalls; it makes them look like shrivelly toddlers.
Aimee Bender
#74. Generally, I think most of my writing tends to have some kind of magical element to it. That's the way I can access the emotional life of the character.
Aimee Bender
#75. I liked Hans Christian Andersen because the tales were so dark and tragic.
Aimee Bender
#76. 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
#77. I write on a very strict 2-hour-a-day schedule, and I really respond to structure and invented rules. So even if I'm finding out good information on a character, I will stop when I'm set to stop.
Aimee Bender
#78. 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.
Aimee Bender
#79. Joseph would reach out to me occasionally, the same way the desert blooms a flower every now and then. You get so used to the subtleties of beige and Brown, and then a sunshine-yellow poppy bursts from the arm of a prickly pear.
Aimee Bender
#80. I find I can write for two lines, and then I have nothing else to say. For me, the only way to find something comes through the sentence level and sticking with the sentences that give a subtle feeling that there's something more to say.
Aimee Bender
#81. 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
#82. You can't predict the outcome. You can't raise a child and then tell them what to think.
Aimee Bender
#83. And, sure, fine, I do check my phone about every two minutes, but so do a lot of people, and it's better than smoking, that's what I say. It's the new, lung-safe cigarette.
Aimee Bender
#84. You're the perfect girl', he said, rubbing his chin. 'You expect nothing.
Aimee Bender
#85. She bops around really energetically but she's also still. Like she's moving her torso but her feet don't move, and then sometimes she'll take one step, and it feels like a thesis statement. Like it is a topic sentence about her butt.
Aimee Bender
#86. 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
#87. A Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.
Aimee Bender
#88. I loved my brother, but relying on him was like closing a hand around air.
Aimee Bender
#89. I like to smile at the men who look mean so they know I believe in their better selves. That makes a difference in the world. This is how you might be able to reform a possible rapist without ever going to psychology school.
Aimee Bender
#90. It's unsettling to meet people who don't eat apples.
Aimee Bender
#91. I felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.
Aimee Bender
#92. We have better things to do. We realize life is not just a dress rehearsal and if you realize it, you don't need a bumper sticker to remind you.
Aimee Bender
#93. Writing can be a frightening, distressing business, and whatever kind of structure or buffer is available can help a lot.
Aimee Bender
#94. 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
#95. Rose,sensing her mother's distress ... She did not face me, but I could feel the vibration of tears, a kind of pain hive,rustling inside her.
Aimee Bender
#96. I love food. I'm not a great cook, but I love to cook, and I like how different it is from writing.
Aimee Bender
#97. Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.
Aimee Bender
#98. 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
#100. I like the idea of a place that is dealing with painful, messy, frightening, and very human events that is also so beautiful and ethereal.
Aimee Bender
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