Quotes from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“…kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“I didn’t mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“My eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“Several of the girls at the party had had sex, something which sounded appealing but only if it could happen with blindfolds in a time warp plus amnesia”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q...”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“...a Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“...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.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“It was the kind of conversation you could only hold in whispers.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“He made a good salary but he did not flaunt it. He’d been raised in Chicago proper by a Lithuanian Jewish mother who had grown up in poverty, telling stories, often, of extending a chicken to its fullest capacity, so as soon as a restaurant served his dish, he would promptly cut it in half and ask for a to-go container. Portions are too big anyway, he’d grumble, patting his waistline. He’d only give away his food if the corners were cleanly cut, as he believed a homeless person would just feel worse eating food with ragged bitemarks at the edges – as if, he said, they are dogs, or bacteria. Dignity, he said, lifting his half-lasagna into its box, is no detail.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“When I crossed the street, according to my mother, I still had to hold someone’s hand. At ten, I would be able to cross streets unhanded. I’d held on to Joseph’s many times before, for many years, but holding his was like holding a plant, and the disappointment of fingers that didn’t grasp back was so acute that at some point I’d opted to take his forearm instead. For the first few street crossings, that’s what I did, but on the corner at Oakwood, on an impulse, I grabbed George’s hand. Right away: fingers, holding back. The sun. More clustery vines of bougainvillea draping over windows in bulges of dark pink. His warm palm. An orange tabby lounging on the sidewalk. People in torn black T-shirts sitting and smoking on steps. The city, opening up.
We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“I loved my brother, but relying on him was like closing a hand around air.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“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.”
― Aimee Bender, quote from The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

About the author

Popular quotes

“I was born free, and that I might live in freedom I chose the solitude of the fields; in the trees of the mountains I find society, the clear waters of the brooks are my mirrors, and to the trees and waters I make known my thoughts and charms. I am a fire afar off, a sword laid aside. Those whom I have inspired with love by letting them see me, I have by words undeceived, and if their longings live on hope—and I have given none to Chrysostom or to any other—it cannot justly be said that the death of any is my doing, for it was rather his own obstinacy than my cruelty that killed him; and if it be made a charge against me that his wishes were honourable, and that therefore I was bound to yield to them, I answer that when on this very spot where now his grave is made he declared to me his purity of purpose, I told him that mine was to live in perpetual solitude, and that the earth alone should enjoy the fruits of my retirement and the spoils of my beauty; and if, after this open avowal, he chose to persist against hope and steer against the wind, what wonder is it that he should sink in the depths of his infatuation? If I had encouraged him, I should be false; if I had gratified him, I should have acted against my own better resolution and purpose. He was persistent in spite of warning, he despaired without being hated. Bethink you now if it be reasonable that his suffering should be laid to my charge. Let him who has been deceived complain, let him give way to despair whose encouraged hopes have proved vain, let him flatter himself whom I shall entice, let him boast whom I shall receive; but let not him call me cruel or homicide to whom I make no promise, upon whom I practise no deception, whom I neither entice nor receive. It has not been so far the will of Heaven that I should love by fate, and to expect me to love by choice is idle. Let this general declaration serve for each of my suitors on his own account, and let it be understood from this time forth that if anyone dies for me it is not of jealousy or misery he dies, for she who loves no one can give no cause for jealousy to any, and candour is not to be confounded with scorn. Let him who calls me wild beast and basilisk, leave me alone as something noxious and evil; let him who calls me ungrateful, withhold his service; who calls me wayward, seek not my acquaintance; who calls me cruel, pursue me not; for this wild beast, this basilisk, this ungrateful, cruel, wayward being has no kind of desire to seek, serve, know, or follow them. If Chrysostom's impatience and violent passion killed him, why should my modest behaviour and circumspection be blamed? If I preserve my purity in the society of the trees, why should he who would have me preserve it among men, seek to rob me of it? I have, as you know, wealth of my own, and I covet not that of others; my taste is for freedom, and I have no relish for constraint; I neither love nor hate anyone; I do not deceive this one or court that, or trifle with one or play with another. The modest converse of the shepherd girls of these hamlets and the care of my goats are my recreations; my desires are bounded by these mountains, and if they ever wander hence it is to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, steps by which the soul travels to its primeval abode.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, quote from Don Quixote

“We feel cold, but we don't mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn't feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It's worth being cold for that.”
― Philip Pullman, quote from The Golden Compass

“I am nothing special, of this I am sure. I am a common man with common thoughts and I've led a common life. There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough..”
― Nicholas Sparks, quote from The Notebook

“For instance, this new idea that You-Know-Who can kill with a single glance from his eyes. That’s a basilisk, listeners. One simple test: Check whether the thing that’s glaring at you has got legs. If it has, it’s safe to look into its eyes, although if it really is You-Know-Who, that’s still likely to be the last thing you ever do.”
― J.K. Rowling, quote from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Old Man and the Sea

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