Aimee Bender

The world can ask you to participate, but it's a day-today decision if you want to agree to that proposal.

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.

Because when, previously, they had wrenched a book out of his hands, he had stared into space so disconcertingly it made the rest of us feel like putting a bag over his head. Sometimes, if he didn't have a book, to occupy Joseph's eyes I would plant a cereal-box side panel in front of him, and his eyes would slide over and attach to the words, as if they could not do anything but roam and float in the air until words and numbers anchored them back into our world.

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.

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.

I give boring people something to discuss over corn.

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

He made a good salary but he did not flaunt it. He__ 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__ grumble, patting his waistline. He__ 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.

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

Nothing...They're from nothing,' he said. 'They came in the book...I found the book and inside were these flowers...They were in the book when I bought it... I bought it used...Because they meant something."'To someone else.' 'To someone.

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

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

George Malcolm: half white, half black, with messy tousled hair, rumpled and tugged between kind of curly and extremely curly. Once, a year or so before, he'd been at our house and he'd pulled out a lock of his hair and used it to teach me about eddies and helixes. It's a circular current into a central station, he'd explained, giving me one to hold. I pulled on the spring. Nature is full of the same shapes, he said, taking me to the bathroom sink and spinning on the top and pointing out the way the water swirled down the drain. Taking me to the bookshelf and flipping open a book on weather and showing me a cyclone. Then a spiral galaxy. Pulling me back to the bathroom sink, to my glass jar of collected seashells, and pointing out the same curl in a miniature conch. See? he said, holding the seashell up to his hair. Yes! I clapped. His eyes were warm with teaching pleasure. It's galactic hair, he said, smiling.At school, George was legendary already. He was so natural at physics that one afternoon the eighth-grade science teacher had asked him to do a preview of the basics of relativity, really fast, for the class. George had stood up and done such a fine job, using a paperweight and a yardstick and the standard-issue school clock, that the teacher had pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet. I'd like to be the first person to pay you for your clarity of mind, the teacher had said. George used the cash to order pizza for the class. Double pepperoni, he told me later, when I'd asked.

But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.

You can ruin anything if you focus at it.

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.

It was ridiculous, at times, how many tears one body could produce.

He had set up a telescope on a corner of the roof, and we went up to take a look.This is time travel, he said, narrowing an eye to set the lens. Because the light is old. We're seeing back in time.No, we said, wrinkling our noses. We are seeing right now, today.No, he said, the light has to travel to us and it takes millions of years. What you're seeing is time. Excuse me, we said. We were embarrassed to correct him. He seemed so smart. What we're seeing is space.It's space, yes, he said. It's also time. You're seeing what has already happened.