Quotes from Aimee Bender

I like the idea of a place that is dealing with painful, messy, frightening, and very human events that is also so beautiful and ethereal.

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

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

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.

Granted, I'm someone who loves words. I've always loved poetry - so it's suited to me.

My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope - make yourself a structure you can live inside.

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.

I want to be violated by insight.

We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.

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.

I give boring people something to discuss over corn.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.

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.

I didn't mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.

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

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.

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.