Aimee Bender
Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest.Collection: Struggle
I don't think so, I don't agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Tears
Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.Collection: Mom
...a Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.Collection: Doritos
To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.Collection: Gratitude
I felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.Collection: Taken
The writing I tend to think of as 'good' is good because it's mysterious.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Dark
But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.Collection: Sky
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.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Moving
We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.Collection: Hands
I didn’t mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Clothes
But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was candles, did she think she'd done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Fire
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.Collection: Meals
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Daughter
You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground.Collection: Nuts
Glen Hirshberg's stories are haunting, absolutely, but not only because of the content -- the stories themselves haunt, they stick around, they linger, inhabiting a little corner of the reader's brain and resurfacing to evoke mystery or sadness or longing. It's a pleasure to dive into Hirshberg's storytelling skills in American Morons.Collection: Sadness
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.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Mom
I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.Collection: Space
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.Collection: Life
My lover is experiencing reverse evolution.Collection: Lovers
Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows. As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.Collection: Running
The wine glasses are empty except for that one undrinkable red spot at the bottom.Collection: Wine
I give boring people something to discuss over corn.Collection: People
I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.Collection: Echoes