The Butterfly Lampshade Quotes

“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, The Butterfly Lampshade

“In the corner, she tells me in a hushed, almost conspiratorial voice that she's very sorry, and she loved those pictures too, but by the time they dragged the furniture and paintings outside to get picked up by sanitation services, everything was literally disintegrating in their hands. "It was actually kind of incredible," she says, widening her eyes. "Watching them dissolve. It was almost like they had never existed in the first place." She flutters her fingers in the air. "Like they returned to dust."
My mother sings wonderfully, and gets a standing ovation from the residents, and Edward hugs her in a way that seems kind, and she introduces me to everyone as her greatest accomplishment, but I think only about the disintegrating paintings during the flight home. They are significant to me in a way I can't quite pinpoint. It's evening by then, and the sun is setting, and the dust motes floating in the body of the plane are lit into a goldenness. Outside the windows, the landscape moves below us, farmlands again, mountain peaks, my own thinking, and by the time the wheels bump to landing, I think it might be because it means that any speck of dust in the world may have once been a part of a beautiful painting. My mother looked happy in her bronze eye shadow, happier than I've ever seen her. My baggage is the last to arrive on the baggage claim.”
― Aimee Bender, The Butterfly Lampshade

“But the need to track my existence didn't end there; sometimes, at recess, while other kids slid and swung and hurled themselves joyfully through space, I would stand by myself at the far end of the playground, and hold still to take stock of my physical cutout in the world. It was a way to remind myself of myself, to tap into the world outside: feet on pavement, taste of cracker, silver fence, breezy air, and it was a very useful activity for me, if alienating to others. I did not, to my luck, catch the eye of the deep bullies, so all I got called was Statue or Lump or teased because Freeze Tag had ended long ago, and a classmate might groan, "Will someone please unfreeze Francie?" while running back to class after the bell rang, and someone might just listen, tapping my shoulder as they passed, and I would use that little link, that beautiful wrong context to pull me back from far inside myself to the group of humanness to which they said I belonged. I usually felt so much better then, following them in, clattering into the classroom, so much surer after taking stock that I could settle in my seat and thank the red cheeks and shining eyes of Luther or Janie or whoever had freed me, and we all laughed at my outer-spaciness even though it had been the pure opposite, that my usual performance of social participation was in fact more subject to internal drift than me who stood by herself with eyes closed listening to others play.”
― Aimee Bender, The Butterfly Lampshade