Quotes from Aimee Bender

It is difficult to want to tell a grave that it is not immortal. It's so obvious at that point.

Don't smile," he said.

She used to call me garbage truck

I think it's good to smile at everybody so that everyone knows you love everyone. It's good for human pacifism.

Joseph would reach out to me occasionally, the same way the desert blooms a flower every now and then. You get so used to the subtleties of beige and brown, and then a sunshine-yellow poppy bursts from the arm of a prickly pear. How I loved those flower moments, like when he pointed out the moon and Jupiter, but they were rare, and never to be expected.

Then he sat down at the table of a larger man, a man with tattoos but the old kind, before tattoos became dainty and about spiritual life. The man wore tattoos from the time when tattoos meant you liked to kick people around.

The afternoons were getting longer again, stretching. I stayed too long at a stoplight because the sunlight was so pretty, sifting through all the leaves on the sycamore trees lining Sierra Bonita, turning each a pale jade green. The jacaranda trees preparing for their burst of true lavender blue come May. Go, said Dad. Sorry, I said.

Most teenage girls don't give old people the time of day which is sad because all old people do all the time is think about how nice it was to be a teenager so long ago.

Sono innamorata dello smettere. A suo modo è un'arte, se ci pensate. Smettere bene richiede un innato senso della bellezza; bisogna saper sentire il momento della svolta, proprio quando il desiderio fa la sua comparsa, quello è il momento di darci un taglio, giù deciso, l'istante in cui lo smettere è maturo come una pesca che si fa dolce sull'albero: crack, si spacca il picciolo, la pesca cade per terra, nera e argento di mosche.

La gente si accorge solo di quando te ne vai; se resti non se ne accorgono. E' come quando si sente davvero un ronzio continuo solo dopo che ha smesso.

The best way I can think to describe it, she said, ' is the way, when you're driving on the freeway at night how everyone can see the moon in their window. Every car on the road. Every car feels the moon is following that car, even in the other direction, right? Everyone in that entire hemisphere can see the moon and think it is there for them, is following where they go.

You can't predict the outcome. You can't raise a child and then tell them what to think.

My birthday cake was her latest project because it was not from a mix but instead built from scratch- the flour, the baking soda, lemon-flavored because at eight that had been my request; I had developed a strong love for sour. We'd looked through several cookbooks together to find just the right one, and the smell in the kitchen was overpoweringly pleasant. To be clear: the bite I ate was delicious. Warm citrus-baked batter lightness enfolded by cool deep dark swirled sugar.

He had a good face to him, something chunky in his nose that I could get behind.

Sherrie would be there, and the last time I'd seen her at a social event she burst into tears when she saw me and ran out of the room. You're upset, I'd yelled after her, meanly.

In those days, she let her hair loose, down to her waist, and whenever I met old friends of hers, they would describe my mother as having resembled a mermaid with legs. With a sheerness to her skin that people wanted to shield.

We are all locked in rooms in different ways, and part of growing up is finding different kinds of keys, and meeting the people who will help free you.

There are students that are scattered, who need to see something through to the finish, but I would say there are possibly more who do not entertain the leaps of the mind that need to be nurtured, and this desire to finish becomes more about being a good student than about finishing something interesting. Where does work ethic fit in with writing? I think that's pretty complicated from one writer to the next. You need some kind of work ethic, but what does it look like for you?

The moon slipped down into the frame of the window and reached an arm of pure light through the glass.

Your eyes shine, he said. How do they do that? Blood, she said.

And because circumstances rarely match, and one afternoon can be a patchwork of both joy and horror, the taste of the soup washed through me

She looked over my shoulder once while I was texting, which was already annoying, and when I wrote lol she made a very clear point to me about how I was silent and not laughing out loud, not at all. I said it was just an expression, and that I was laughing out loud inside my own mind.

Food is all those substances which, submitted to the action of the stomach, can be assimilated or changed into life by digestion, and can thus repair the losses which the human body suffers through the act of living. —The Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin

I wanted to marry wood. I wanted to chew down some two–by–fours, crawl inside a tree, slide elm into my aorta so that every beat of every second was a grand waltz with luck.