Top 85 Emma Cline Quotes
#1. Illuminati communicated with one another. "Why would a secret
Emma Cline
#2. She was flanked by a skinny redhead and an older girl, dressed with the same shabby afterthought. As if dredged from a lake.
Emma Cline
#3. Money is ego, and people won't give it up. Just want to protect themselves, hold on to it like a blanket. They don't realize it keeps them slaves. It's sick" "What's funny is that as soon as you give everything away, as soon as you say, Here, take it - that's when you really have everything".
Emma Cline
#4. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how badly people wanted it - to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been still existed inside of them. There
Emma Cline
#5. but I was past the point of caring, the night stoking a foolish, confused sense that I had somehow returned to the world after a period of absence, had taken up residence again in the realm of the living.
Emma Cline
#6. He'd looked at us like we were butterflies he was pinning to a board.
Emma Cline
#7. the liquor aiding the shorthand of my loneliness. It was strange that I could feel differently so easily, that there was a sure way to soften the crud of my own sadness.
Emma Cline
#8. Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved. They noticed what we want noticed.
Emma Cline
#9. They suggested E-meters, Gestalt, eating only high-mineral foods that had been planted during a full moon.
Emma Cline
#10. But I could not fully admit it, even then. The way Suzanne's face looked as she watched him - I wanted to be with her. I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they'd understand the scale and intensity of your feelings and act accordingly.
Emma Cline
#11. You wanted things and you couldn't help it, because there was only your life, only yourself to wake up with, and how could you ever tell yourself what you wanted was wrong?
Emma Cline
#12. My eyes were already habituated to the texture of decay, so I thought that I had passed back into the circle of light.
Emma Cline
#14. Julian smiled what I thought of as the smile of an only son, someone who believed he would always get what he wanted.
Emma Cline
#15. How impotent my anger was, a surge with no place to land, and how familiar that was: my feelings strangled inside me, like little half-formed children, bitter and bristling.
Emma Cline
#16. At that age I looked at women with brutal and emotionless judgement. Assessing the slope of their breasts, imagining how they would look in very crude positions.
Emma Cline
#17. My glitchy adolescent brain was desperate for causalities, for conspiracies that drenched every word, every gesture, with meaning.
Emma Cline
#18. Mitch studied me with a questioning, smug smile. Men did it so easily, that immediate parceling of value. And how they seemed to want you to collude on your own judgement.
Emma Cline
#19. The queer reminder in her smile. Like we had a meeting, she and I, at some appointed time and place, and she knew I would forget.
Emma Cline
#20. But Suzanne got the worst of it. Depraved. Evil. Her sneaky beauty didn't photograph well. She looked feral and meager, like she might have existed only to kill. Talking
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#21. ...I was confusing familiarity with happiness. Because that was there even when love wasn't...
Emma Cline
#22. How they told me I was having fun all the time, and there was no way to explain that I wasn't.
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#23. I'd always liked her in a way I never had to think about, like the fact of my own hands.
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#24. Her face as pale and blameless as a lesser moon. -
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#25. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get.
Emma Cline
#26. I could drink until my problems seemed compact and pretty, something I could admire.
Emma Cline
#27. The moment the frightened people understand the sweet dailiness of their lives - the swallow of morning orange juice, the tilting curve taken on a bicycle - is already gone.
Emma Cline
#28. When I was that age, I was uncertain of how to move, whether I was walking too fast, whether others could see the discomfort and stiffness in me. As if everyone were constantly gauging my performance and finding it lacking.
Emma Cline
#29. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of
Emma Cline
#30. Break down the self, offer yourself up like dust to the universe.
Emma Cline
#31. How drugs patchworked simple, banal thoughts into phrases that seemed filled with importance. My glitchy adolescent brain was desperate for causalities, for conspiracies that drenched every word, every gesture, with meaning. I wanted Russell to be a genius.
Emma Cline
#32. the sweet drone of honeysuckle thickening the
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#33. The things I was good at had no real application: addressing envelopes in bubble letters with smiling creatures on the flap. Making sludgy coffee I drank with grave affect. Finding a certain desired song playing on the radio, like a medium scanning for news of the dead.
Emma Cline
#34. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.
Emma Cline
#35. Maybe I should have been frightened of him. This older man who saw that I was alone, who felt like I owed him something, which was the worst thing a man like that could feel.
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#36. if by putting distance between us, I could cure myself of the same disease.
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#37. Let's just give her a ride into town," Suzanne said.
She spoke briskly, like I was a mess that needed to be cleaned up. Even so, I was glad. I was used to thinking about people who never thought about me.
Emma Cline
#38. That was part of being a girl--you were resigned to whatever feedback you'd get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn't react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they'd backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.
Emma Cline
#39. Why couldn't relationships be reciprocal, both people steadily accruing interest at the same rate?
Emma Cline
#40. He had a weary air of responsibility about him, both bureaucratic and mythological, like someone doomed to guard a cave for all eternity. I
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#41. It was an age when I'd immediately scan and rank other girls, keeping up a constant tally of how I fell short.
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#42. I was already starting to understand that other people's admiration asked something of you. That you had to shape yourself around it.
Emma Cline
#43. I envied Victor's certainty, the idiot syntax of the righteous. This belief - that the world had a visible order, and all we had to do was look for the symbols - as if evil were a code that could be cracked.
Emma Cline
#44. At that age, I was, first and foremost, a thing to be judged, and that shifted the power in every interaction onto the other person. The
Emma Cline
#45. She searched until there was only searching left.
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#46. I waited to be told what was good about me. [...] All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you- the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.
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#47. We were jealous, imagining a boyfriend who wanted you so bad he broke the law.
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#48. She had already absented herself, I knew, gone to that other place in her mind where Julian was sweet and kind and life was fun, or if it wasn't fun, it was interesting, and wasn't that valuable, didn't that mean something?
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#49. Who had ever held Suzanne in their arms and told her that her heart, beating away in her chest, was there on purpose?
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#51. just the suffocating constancy of my own self, that numb and desperate company. -
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#52. There wasn't that much difference. Between me and the other girls.
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#53. Maybe this was a better way, even though it seemed alien. To be part of this amorphous group, believing love could come from any direction. So you wouldn't be disappointed if not enough came from the direction you'd hoped. -
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#54. It pained me to imagine how our twosome appeared to others, marked as the kind of girls who belonged to each other.
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#55. But it was something else, too, that I wanted to extend: the taut and pleasant silence in the car, the stale heat raising vapours of leather. The warped image of myself in the side mirrors, so I caught only the quantity of hair, the freckled skin of my shoulder. I took on the shape of a girl.
Emma Cline
#56. We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves that we hid from them - they would never sense the lack or even know there was something more they should be looking for. Suzanne
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#57. Pamela was beautiful, it was true, and I felt that submerged attraction to her that everyone felt for the beautiful.
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#59. No one had ever looked at me before Suzanne, not really, so she became my definition. Her gaze softening my centre so easily that even photographs of her seemed aimed at me, ignited with private meaning.
Emma Cline
#60. Someone's boyfriend died in a rock-climbing accident in Switzerland: everyone gathered around her, on fire with tragedy. Their dramatic shows up support underpinned with jealousy- bad luck was rare enough to be glamorous.
Emma Cline
#61. Girls were good at coloring in those disappointing blank spots.
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#62. A lot of young people ran away: you could do it back then just because you were bored. You didn't even need a tragedy.
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#63. The man was bearing down on me. My hands were limp and wet. Please, I thought. Please. Who was I addressing? The man? God? Whoever handled these things.
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#64. I believed, in the way of adolescents, in the absolute correctness and superiority of my love.
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#65. These long-haired girls seemed to glide above all that was happening around them, tragic and separate. Like royalty in exile. I
Emma Cline
#66. This is what it might be like to be a mother, I though, watching Sasha drain her beer, wipe her mouth like a boy. To feel this unexpected, boundless tenderness for someone, seemingly out of nowhere.
Emma Cline
#67. It took sustained, constant living to ward off decay.
Emma Cline
#68. The hatred that vibrated beneath the surface of my girl's face-- I think Suzanne recognized it. Of course my hand would anticipate the weight of a knife. The particular give of a human body. There was so much to destroy.
Emma Cline
#69. Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you.
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#70. The ways your desire could humiliate you.
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#73. her face answered all its own questions. I
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#74. I would always be like this, I thought, the person who closed the refrigerator.
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#75. I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they'd understand the scale and intensity of your feelings and act accordingly. That seemed fair to me, as if fairness were a measure the universe cared anything about.
Emma Cline
#77. She must have already forgiven him for leaving her behind. Girls were good at coloring in those disappointing blank spots. I thought of the night before, her exaggerated moans. Poor Sasha. She
Emma Cline
#78. The silences between us would've been better if they were colored with sadness or regret, but it was worse - I could hear how happy he was to be gone.
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#79. The fumes of cruciferous vegetables, roiling in plastic bags. Nothing
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#80. Sometimes it seemed like I never really left ...That a version of me is always there.
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#81. And now I was older, and the wishful props of future selves had lost their comforts. I might always feel some form of this, a depression that did not lift but grew compact and familiar, a space occupied like the sad limbo of hotel rooms.
Emma Cline
#82. I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains.
Emma Cline
#83. That's how badly people wanted it - to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been still existed inside of them.
Emma Cline
#84. I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board.
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#85. We licked batteries to feel a metallic jolt on the tongue, rumored to be one-eighteenth of an orgasm.
Emma Cline
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