Top 90 Aimee Bender Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.”

— Aimee Bender

2. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

3. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

4. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

5. “I don’t think so, I don’t agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.”

— Aimee Bender

6. “I peeled the skin off a grape in slippery little triangles, and I understood then that I would be undressing every item of food I could because my clothes would be staying on.”

— Aimee Bender

7. “Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.”

— Aimee Bender

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

— Aimee Bender

9. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

10. “I give boring people something to discuss over corn.”

— Aimee Bender

11. “Well, the truth is, vacations are pointless anyway, because you always have to come back, so you might as well save time, skip the middle step, and stay put in the first place.”

— Aimee Bender

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

— Aimee Bender

13. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

14. “I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me, I am not happy, help me – like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message.”

— Aimee Bender

15. “You can ruin anything if you focus at it.”

— Aimee Bender

16. “It is so often surprising, who rescues you at your lowest moments.”

— Aimee Bender

17. “My lover is experiencing reverse evolution.”

— Aimee Bender

18. “And, sure, fine, I do check my phone about every two minutes, but so do a lot of people, and it’s better than smoking, that’s what I say. It’s the new, lung-safe cigarette.”

— Aimee Bender

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

— Aimee Bender

20. “My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope – make yourself a structure you can live inside.”

— Aimee Bender

21. “It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.”

— Aimee Bender

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

— Aimee Bender

23. “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

24. “I want to be violated by insight.”

— Aimee Bender

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

— Aimee Bender

26. “Last day I saw him human, he was sad about the world.”

— Aimee Bender

27. “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

28. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

29. “It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things...”

— Aimee Bender

30. “Twice I’d come home as they were finishing, and, honestly, I cannot think of a lonelier sound on a Saturday night than one’s roommate having a giant orgasm and then making an embarrassed sssh sound, realizing that maybe through her pleasure she’d heard the front door open and close.”

— Aimee Bender

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

— Aimee Bender

32. “But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.”

— Aimee Bender

33. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

34. “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

35. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

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

— Aimee Bender

37. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

38. “Large meadows are lovely for picnics and romping, but they are for the lighter feelings. Meadows do not make me want to write.”

— Aimee Bender

39. “The wine glasses are empty except for that one undrinkable red spot at the bottom.”

— Aimee Bender

40. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

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

— Aimee Bender

42. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

43. “It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what’s happened.”

— Aimee Bender

44. “You can’t predict the outcome. You can’t raise a child and then tell them what to think.”

— Aimee Bender

45. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

46. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

47. “I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q...”

— Aimee Bender

48. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

49. “You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground.”

— Aimee Bender

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

— Aimee Bender