Top 100 Aimee Bender Quotes
#1. For me as a person, friendships are incredibly important to me, but in writing, they can distract me.
Aimee Bender
#2. 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
#3. Last day I saw him human, he was sad about the world.
Aimee Bender
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. I didn't mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.
Aimee Bender
#9. YOU'RE IN MY MOUTH, I said. GET OUT OF MY MOUTH.
Aimee Bender
#10. 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
#11. The wine glasses are empty except for that one undrinkable red spot at the bottom.
Aimee Bender
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.
Aimee Bender
#17. 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
#18. I am going to host Thanksgiving myself and instead of a turkey I'm serving a big human butt.
Aimee Bender
#19. 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
#20. Nothing ... They're from nothing,' he said. 'They came in the book ... I found the book and inside were these flowers ... They were in the book when I bought it ... I bought it used ... Because they meant something.
'To someone else.'
'To someone.
Aimee Bender
#21. 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
#23. As a kid, I often figured it was good to be patient to a fault.
Aimee Bender
#24. I will never die, thought the cake to itself, in even simpler terms, as cakes did not have sophisticated use of language.
Aimee Bender
#25. I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q ...
Aimee Bender
#26. ... kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.
Aimee Bender
#27. My lover is experiencing reverse evolution.
Aimee Bender
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. This woman he met was the woman he met and however you try, you cannot unmeet.
Aimee Bender
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. It was the kind of conversation you could only hold in whispers.
Aimee Bender
#35. I don't think so, I don't agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.
Aimee Bender
#36. 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
#37. But rock, of course, is many colors. The distinction is subtle, but it is not just one plain grey, that I can promise ... I spent five hours one afternoon just staring at a rock trying to see into its color scheme.
Aimee Bender
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.
Aimee Bender
#41. I did plays in college, and I have half of a play. But I'm kind of stuck. I keep revisiting it so maybe it will move somewhere. There's something about plays where you can feel that sense of artifice at any moment.
Aimee Bender
#42. I admired that stride; it was like he folded space in two with it.
Aimee Bender
#43. 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
#44. He had a good face to him, something chunky in his nose that I could get behind.
Aimee Bender
#45. The writing I tend to think of as 'good' is good because it's mysterious.
Aimee Bender
#46. I can't tell you exactly what I'm looking for, but I'll know it when it happens. I want to be breathless and weak, crumpled by the entrance of another person inside my soul. I want to be violated by insight.
Aimee Bender
#47. The world can ask you to participate, but it's a day-today decision if you want to agree to that proposal.
Aimee Bender
#48. My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope - make yourself a structure you can live inside.
Aimee Bender
#49. Her blush was the color of a coral reef, but smooth.
Aimee Bender
#50. I love the idea of numerology, but I don't really believe in it. But I like thinking about what numbers convey.
Aimee Bender
#51. My eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.
Aimee Bender
#52. Granted, I'm someone who loves words. I've always loved poetry - so it's suited to me.
Aimee Bender
#53. We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.
Aimee Bender
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. She could feel it brimming on her lips, that superstar smile, the bow shape, the teeth long and solid tombstones.
Aimee Bender
#60. 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
#61. It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moments.
Aimee Bender
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.
Aimee Bender
#65. We're like the couple on the sitcom that has good sparks but never get together for the sake of ratings.
Aimee Bender
#66. 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
#67. But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.
Aimee Bender
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. I wanted to bathe in plum juice, rediscover my body and adorn it in kiwi circles.
Aimee Bender
#71. We are all, generally, symmetrical: ants, elephants, lions, fish, flowers, leaves. But she was a tree. No one expects a tree to be symmetrical at all.
Aimee Bender
#72. 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
#73. I felt her come by later, as I was dozing off. Her standing, by my bed. The depth of shadow of a person felt behind closed eyelids.
Aimee Bender
#74. 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
#75. I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.
Aimee Bender
#76. I think it's good to smile at everybody so that everyone knows you love everyone. It's good for human pacifism.
Aimee Bender
#77. 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
#78. When language is treated beautifully and interestingly, it can feel good for the body: It's nourishing; it's rejuvenating.
Aimee Bender
#79. I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.
Aimee Bender
#80. 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
#81. I give boring people something to discuss over corn.
Aimee Bender
#82. To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.
Aimee Bender
#83. [ ... ]when he closed his eyes, the torrent of longing waiting inside was so thick he thought he might drown in it.
Aimee Bender
#84. Being there was like having a good cry, the clearing of the air after weight has been held.
Aimee Bender
#85. There was love to be felt, and discovered, still.
Aimee Bender
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Ponytail girl leaned over and she and the tall boy kissed and it was carcinogen gums and magical.
Aimee Bender
#89. 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
#90. It is difficult to want to tell a grave that it is not immortal. It's so obvious at that point.
Aimee Bender
#91. Twice I'd come home as they were finishing, and, honestly, I cannot think of a lonelier sound on a Saturday night than one's roommate having a giant orgasm and then making an embarrassed sssh sound, realizing that maybe through her pleasure she'd heard the front door open and close.
Aimee Bender
#93. 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
#94. I love all the arts - so museums, theatre, music, walks near trees or by the ocean, time with people, psychological readings.
Aimee Bender
#95. She is walking around the living room naked and
Aimee Bender
#97. I have trouble describing my own style, since it's sort of like describing my own eye color or something.
Aimee Bender
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Pain was no longer a mystery to him, and a man familiar with pain has entered a new kind of freedom.
Aimee Bender
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