Aimee Bender > Quotes

“My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope - make yourself a structure you can live inside.”
― Aimee Bender, Willful Creatures

“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, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“I want to be violated by insight.”
― Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

“We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“I give boring people something to discuss over corn.”
― Aimee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

“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, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, Willful Creatures: Stories

“I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, The Color Master: Stories

“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

“My eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“…kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“I didn’t mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, Willful Creatures

“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, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

“It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moments.”
― Aimee Bender, The Color Master: Stories

“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, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“It was the kind of conversation you could only hold in whispers.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“...a Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“He made a good salary but he did not flaunt it. He’d been raised in Chicago proper by a Lithuanian Jewish mother who had grown up in poverty, telling stories, often, of extending a chicken to its fullest capacity, so as soon as a restaurant served his dish, he would promptly cut it in half and ask for a to-go container. Portions are too big anyway, he’d grumble, patting his waistline. He’d only give away his food if the corners were cleanly cut, as he believed a homeless person would just feel worse eating food with ragged bitemarks at the edges – as if, he said, they are dogs, or bacteria. Dignity, he said, lifting his half-lasagna into its box, is no detail.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

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

“I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q...”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake