Top 90 Aimee Bender Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Aimee Bender

53. “I wanted to bathe in plum juice, rediscover my body and adorn it in kiwi circles.”

— Aimee Bender

54. “When she came back inside, she was gripping a yogurt cup someone had thrown near our side strip of garden. “Plastic doesn’t cycle.” She shrugged off her coat. “Right? We recycle it, but it can’t do anything on its own, and all it can ever do is be itself again. It is the worst kind of reincarnation. Lame! That is so lame! And it’s everywhere!” she cried, going to the bathroom to splash water on her face.”

— Aimee Bender

55. “With hand gestures, you can fill in a lot of gaps, and the words thing and stuff and -ness also help: patientness instead of patience, fastness instead of speed, honestness instead of honesty. With these choices, many words can be indicated, and pointing or gesticulating usually works.”

— Aimee Bender

56. “I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.”

— Aimee Bender

57. “The writing I tend to think of as ‘good’ is good because it’s mysterious.”

— Aimee Bender

58. “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?”

— Aimee Bender

59. “I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.”

— Aimee Bender

60. “She bops around really energetically but she’s also still. Like she’s moving her torso but her feet don’t move, and then sometimes she’ll take one step, and it feels like a thesis statement. Like it is a topic sentence about her butt.”

— Aimee Bender

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

— Aimee Bender

62. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

63. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

64. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

65. “I asked them: Does it hurt? And the scar people nodded, yes. But it felt somehow wonderful, they said. For one long second, it felt like the world was holding them close.”

— Aimee Bender

66. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

67. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

68. “She could feel it brimming on her lips, that superstar smile, the bow shape, the teeth long and solid tombstones.”

— Aimee Bender

69. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

70. “But rock, of course, is many colors. The distinction is subtle, but it is not just one plain grey, that I can promise... I spent five hours one afternoon just staring at a rock trying to see into its color scheme.”

— Aimee Bender

71. “She was tired these days because she was having job trouble too; her trouble meant she did not know how she could be useful in her life. Dad’s job trouble was he had too much to do with his life. Sometimes I just wanted them to even it out but I couldn’t think of how.”

— Aimee Bender

72. “It was the kind of conversation you could only hold in whispers.”

— Aimee Bender

73. “I admired that stride; it was like he folded space in two with it.”

— Aimee Bender

74. “I am going to host Thanksgiving myself and instead of a turkey I’m serving a big human butt.”

— Aimee Bender

75. “When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.”

— Aimee Bender

76. “We’re like the couple on the sitcom that has good sparks but never get together for the sake of ratings.”

— Aimee Bender

77. “Walk soft, like whispers.”

— Aimee Bender

78. “We end up kissing her for an hour, and her lips are so soft they are almost like a joke.”

— Aimee Bender

79. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

80. “When language is treated beautifully and interestingly, it can feel good for the body: It’s nourishing; it’s rejuvenating.”

— Aimee Bender

81. “After the incident in the ER, Ino longer wanted to advertise my experience to anyone. You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground. There’s a kind of show a kid can do, for a parent – a show of pain, to try to announce something, and in my crying, in the desperate, blabbering, awful mouth-clawing, I had hoped to get something across. Had it come across, any of it? Nope.”

— Aimee Bender

82. “You’re the perfect girl’, he said, rubbing his chin. ‘You expect nothing.”

— Aimee Bender

83. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

84. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

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

— Aimee Bender

86. “Though loss did not pass from one person to another like a baton; it just formed a bigger and bigger pool of carriers.”

— Aimee Bender

87. “She is walking around the living room naked and.”

— Aimee Bender

88. “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.”

— Aimee Bender

89. “Bite in! I said. The sound of crackling. Eliza giggled in the back. Her parents did not allow her to eat Doritos. I was her drug dealer, in this way. See? I said. What does it taste like? A Dorito, said a smartass in the front row. Cheese, said someone else. Really? I said. They concentrated on their chips. That good dust stuff, said someone else. Exactly, I said. That good dust stuff.”

— Aimee Bender

90. “She used to call me garbage truck.”

— Aimee Bender