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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

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Aimee Bender
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: June 28
Novelist
Writer
the United States of America
Father
Manual
Another
Manuals
Best
Translated
Like
Code
Daughter
Read
Language
Codes
Understand
Exchanging

More quotes by Aimee Bender

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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.
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But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was candles, did she think she'd done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?
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The writing I tend to think of as 'good' is good because it's mysterious.
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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.
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You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground.
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I didn’t mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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…kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.
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...a Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.
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I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q...
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You're the perfect girl', he said, rubbing his chin. 'You expect nothing.
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I don't think so, I don't agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.
Aimee Bender
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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.
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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.
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I felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.
Aimee Bender
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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
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I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.
Aimee Bender
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The wine glasses are empty except for that one undrinkable red spot at the bottom.
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