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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
Daughter
Read
Language
Codes
Understand
Exchanging
Father
Manual
Another
Manuals
Best
Translated
Like
Code

More quotes by Aimee Bender

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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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As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.
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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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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.
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…kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.
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I want to be violated by insight.
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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.
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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.
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The writing I tend to think of as 'good' is good because it's mysterious.
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Glen Hirshberg's stories are haunting, absolutely, but not only because of the content -- the stories themselves haunt, they stick around, they linger, inhabiting a little corner of the reader's brain and resurfacing to evoke mystery or sadness or longing. It's a pleasure to dive into Hirshberg's storytelling skills in American Morons.
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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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Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.
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I felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.
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I admired that stride it was like he folded space in two with it.
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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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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. This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed than they were when they came in. Nobody cooked that burger.
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The wine glasses are empty except for that one undrinkable red spot at the bottom.
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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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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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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