Quotes from 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.

Mom's smiles were so full of feeling that people leaned back a little when she greeted them. It was hard to know just how much was being offered.

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.

But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.

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.

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.

Walk soft, like whispers.

Rose,sensing her mother's distress...She did not face me, but I could feel the vibration of tears, a kind of pain hive,rustling inside her.

There was love to be felt, and discovered, still.

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.

when he closed his eyes, the torrent of longing waiting inside was so thick he thought he might drown in it.

I felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.

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.

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.

This woman he met was the woman he met and however you try, you cannot unmeet.

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.

Being there was like having a good cry, the clearing of the air after weight has been held.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

You can ruin anything if you focus at it.