Aimee Bender Quotes & Sayings

For me as a person, friendships are incredibly important to me, but in writing, they can distract me. — Aimee Bender

But she was not there, in it. It so — Aimee Bender

I've noticed this: when it's the first date, and you fuck, the guy hold you much better than he does the next few times. The first date, you're sort of the stand-in for whomever he loved last, before he fully realizes that you're not her, and so you get all this nice residue emotion. I felt cherished, tucked into his belly, like we'd known each other for years and I was his wonderful girl and we both slept great. — Aimee Bender

I will never die, thought the cake to itself, in even simpler terms, as cakes did not have sophisticated use of language. — Aimee Bender

One could not spend one's life in the imaginings of another life. — Aimee Bender

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

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

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

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

It was ridiculous, at times, how many tears one body could produce. — Aimee Bender

No one needed to say it, but the room overflowed with that sort of blessing. The combination of loss and abundance. The abundance that has no guilt. The loss that has no fix. The simple tiredness that is not weary. The hope not built on blindness. — 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

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

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

When she left the store, emboldened, receipt tucked into her purse, folded twice, Janet thought of all the chicken dishes she had not sent back even though they were either half-raw or not what she had ordered. Chicken Kiev instead of chicken Marsala, chicken with mushrooms instead of chicken a la king: her body was made up of the wrong chickens. — Aimee Bender

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

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

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

I am going to host Thanksgiving myself and instead of a turkey I'm serving a big human butt. — Aimee Bender

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

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

Novels are so much unrulier and more stressful to write. A short story can last two pages and then it's over, and that's kind of a relief. I really like balancing the two. — Aimee Bender

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

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

He breathed in her hair, the sweet-smelling thickness of it. My father usually agreed with her requests, because stamped in his two-footed stance and jaw was the word Provider, and he loved her the way a bird-watcher's heart leaps when he hears the call of the roseate spoonbill, a fluffy pink wader, calling its lilting coo-coo from the mangroves. Check, says the bird-watcher. Sure, said my father, tapping a handful of mail against her back. — Aimee Bender

It was the kind of conversation you could only hold in whispers. — 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

Writing can be a frightening, distressing business, and whatever kind of structure or buffer is available can help a lot. — 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

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

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

I asked them: Does it hurt? And the scar people nodded, yes. But it felt somehow wonderful, they said. For one long second, it felt like the world was holding them close. — Aimee Bender

Her blush was the color of a coral reef, but smooth. — Aimee Bender

In other words, don't be reductive. Often, writers will rush to an ending that completes, or sums up, or reduces their story as opposed to moving to a place where it goes to something they may not understand and that may be incomplete but is more honest. That rush doesn't do a service to anyone. It doesn't do a service to the work, and it doesn't do a service to the reader. We know that things are complex; we want things to be complex so that, together, we can look deeply into the layers of an open system. — Aimee Bender

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

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

For me, even in my first book, the pleasures of writing anything magical is that it has to be physical. It has to be grounded and very much in this world. Then, I get to play with all the consequences of this new thing. — Aimee Bender

And in it all, the sensation of shaking my fists at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky, because that is what we do when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too undervalued by the world, or sometimes just at all
we shake our fists at the big, beautiful, indifferent sky, and the anger is righteous and strong and helpless and huge. I shook and I shook, and I put all of it into the dress. — Aimee Bender

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

As a kid, I often figured it was good to be patient to a fault. — Aimee Bender

I don't eschew autobiographical writing, but I'm not interested in mine to be so straightforward. The things that tend to move me the most are often those that I have to figure out its meaning for myself. The human being's ability to make a metaphor to describe a human experience is just really cool. — Aimee Bender

There was love to be felt, and discovered, still. — Aimee Bender

It can feel so lonely, to see strangers out in the day, shopping, on a day that is not a good one. On this one: the day I returned from the emergency room after having a fit about wanting to remove my mouth. Not an easy day to look at people in their vivid clothes, in their shining hair, pointing and smiling at colorful woven sweaters.
I wanted to erase them all. But I also wanted to be them all, and I could not erase them and want to be them at the same time.
At home, Joseph was nicer to me than usual and we played a silent game of Parcheesi for an hour in the slanted box of remaining sunlight on the carpet. Dad came by and brought me a pillow. Mom went to take a nap. Joseph won. I went to bed early. I woke up the same. — 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

Although psychotherapy and writing are distinct in many ways, they are two fields whose great resource is the vast plains of the unconscious mind and how this landscape gets translated into words. As a writer, you are often asking your mind to dream while awake, and if remembering dreams is difficult in general, then it seems to follow that it would be sometimes grueling to conjure up the murky depths on call, eyes open. (Robert M. Young) calls it madness, which is a strong word, but it's not a bad one in exaggeration, because he's talking about creating a safe and bound space in which to explore all sorts of darknesses that collect in the recesses of the mind. He's talking about what we do not understand, or know about, or have control over. And the unconscious, if treated well, is the writer's very good friend. Allowing it room is crucial. Allowing it structure can be the safest way to access it without feeling overwhelmed. — Aimee Bender

It's tempting to think of red for sun," she said, "but it has to be just a dash, not much. More of a dark orange and a hint of brown. And then white on yellow on white. Not bright white,' she said. 'The kind of white that makes you squint, but in a softer way ... '
'Go look at fire for a while. Go spend some time with fire.'
Looking at fire was interesting, I have to admit. I sat with a candle for a couple hours. It has these stages of color: the white, the yellow, the red, the tiny spot of blue I'd heard mentioned but never noticed. — Aimee Bender

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

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

I developed a prejudice in high school that it was all going to be boring. That kind of teenage, why-do-I-have-to-read-these-goddamn-classics feeling. And then you discover that the classics are classics because they're lively. They don't stick around because they're boring. If they're boring, they go away. — Aimee Bender

Some creative writing programs seem evil, but my experience at Irvine was totally the opposite, where I feel like they were really good at focusing in on each writers voice and setting. When I felt like I was obligated to write a story that was more typical, no one really liked it. — Aimee Bender

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

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

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

The afternoons were getting longer again, stretching. I stayed too long at a stoplight because the sunlight was so pretty, sifting through all the leaves on the sycamore trees lining Sierra Bonita, turning each a pale jade green. The jacaranda trees preparing for their burst of true lavender blue come May.
Go, said Dad.
Sorry, I said. — Aimee Bender

The writing I tend to think of as 'good' is good because it's mysterious. — Aimee Bender

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

I love all the arts - so museums, theatre, music, walks near trees or by the ocean, time with people, psychological readings. — Aimee Bender

Now she and the widow had something in common, though loss did not pass from one person to another like a baton. It just formed a bigger and bigger pool of carriers. And she thought, scratching the coarseness of the horses's mane, it did not leave, once lodged, did it? It simply changed form, and asked repeatedly for attention and care as each year revealed a new knot to cry out and consider, smaller, sure, but never gone ... Out of my body, these beautiful monsters. — Aimee Bender

In Murakami's short story 'The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day,' the main character is a writer. In describing the act of writing to a tightrope walker, he says, 'What a writer is *supposed* to do is observe and observe and observe again, and put off making judgments to the last possible moment.' I think that is a beautiful description of writing; it lets the world be, but also there is a moment, finally, of some kind of opinion. There is that moment, but to hold it off is a lovely and worthwhile goal. — Aimee Bender

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

Walk soft, like whispers. — Aimee Bender

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

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

That," she said, "is a little closer to how I imagine it works. Whether or not you pray has absolutely nothing to do with the person to your left. It's like saying you shouldn't get the moon in your window, or else the other cars wouldn't get the moon in their windows. But everyone gets the moon. It's not an option, to not have the moon in your window. You just see it. It's there."
She bit her lip. The window in the office grew golden with late afternoon.
"Half the world can't see the moon," said the doctor.
"It's not the greatest example," said the rabbi. — Aimee Bender

The phone is about the same size as a cigarette pack. It's no surprise to me that the traditional cigarette lighter in many cars has turned into the space we use to recharge our phones. They are kin. The phone, like the cigarette, let's the texter/former smoker drop out of any social interaction for a second to get a break and make a little love to the beautiful object. We need something, people. We can't live propless. — Aimee Bender

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

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

You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground. — Aimee Bender

I liked Hans Christian Andersen because the tales were so dark and tragic. — Aimee Bender

When we sleep together, he holds me like he loves me. I've noticed this: when it's the first date, and you fuck, the guy holds you much better than he does the next few times. The first date, you're sort of a stand-in for whomever he loved last, before he fully realizes you're not her, so you get all this nice residue emotion. — Aimee Bender

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

I think it's good to smile at everybody so that everyone knows you love everyone. It's good for human pacifism. — 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

He had a good face to him, something chunky in his nose that I could get behind. — Aimee Bender

Well, the truth is, vacations are pointless anyway, because you always have to come back, so you might as well save time, skip the middle step, and stay put in the first place. — Aimee Bender

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

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

In terms of foods for me, I think I have more of the usual associations - foods from childhood that I associate with care and love, from relatives or special restaurants like the kind elderly man who dusted seasoning salt on French fries at the corner burger joint. — Aimee Bender

Your eyes shine," he said. "How do they do that?"
"Blood," she said. — Aimee Bender

We end up kissing her for an hour, and her lips are so soft they are almost like a joke. — 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

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

We're like the couple on the sitcom that has good sparks but never get together for the sake of ratings. — Aimee Bender

Last day I saw him human, he was sad about the world. — Aimee Bender

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

It is difficult to want to tell a grave that it is not immortal. It's so obvious at that point. — Aimee Bender

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

The best way I can think to describe it, she said, ' is the way, when you're driving on the freeway at night how everyone can see the moon in their window. Every car on the road. Every car feels the moon is following that car, even in the other direction, right? Everyone in that entire hemisphere can see the moon and think it is there for them, is following where they go. — Aimee Bender

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

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

It's unsettling to meet people who don't eat apples. — Aimee Bender

He moved his fingers down her whole spine, one by one by one, and during the time it took to do that, his brain remained absolutely quiet.
It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what's happened; before you find yourself, at the base of her spine, different. — Aimee Bender

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ponytail girl leaned over and she and the tall boy kissed and it was carcinogen gums and magical. — Aimee Bender

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