Megan Abbott Quotes

#1. If it hadn't been what it was, it would've been beautiful.

Megan Abbott

#2. We're all wanting things we don't understand. things we can't even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions over our hearts.

Megan Abbott

#3. That's what parenthood was about, wasn't it? Slowly understanding your child less and less until she wasn't yours anymore but herself.

Megan Abbott

#4. I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.

Megan Abbott

#5. Can I trust you, Addy?" he asks. I say he can. Does anyone ever answer that question with a no?

Megan Abbott

#6. It is not aloofness, superiority. It's a protection. Who in this ravaged battlefield doesn't want to gather close her comrades?

Megan Abbott

#7. Being a girl is so hard, Katie thought. And it only gets harder. The

Megan Abbott

#8. It was the best night ever.
And they hadn't talked about any of it since.

Megan Abbott

#9. But it only makes visible a darkness that's already there. Maybe eating it like that ... " She looked at Deenie, her voice like a pulse in Deenie's brain. "Maybe you bring the darkness inside you. Maybe Lise has it inside her now.

Megan Abbott

#10. Love is a kind of killing, Addy," she says. "Don't you know that?

Megan Abbott

#11. That was what gymnastics did, though. It aged girls and kept them young forever at the same time. And

Megan Abbott

#12. Never make eye contact with a wolf. The wolf will take it as a challenge.

Megan Abbott

#13. There is something bad here, growing. Day and night I watch it. Growing. - Sophocles, Electra

Megan Abbott

#14. You really only learn your place, her mother once said, when you're left in it.

Megan Abbott

#15. Because she was solid gold, fourteen-carat, barely burnished despite twenty years of hard molling. But beneath it, I knew, beneath that gold and stardust, she was all grit and sharp teeth gnashing, head twisting, talons out, tearing flesh. She was all open mouth, tunneling into an awful nothing.

Megan Abbott

#16. Because there's a hundred ways sex can ruin you but there's no end to the ways love can.

Megan Abbott

#17. I think she might cry. In her way, she is.

Megan Abbott

#18. Had the water done something? Did it do something to me? She wondered. Do I look different? Then she remembered asking herself that question before, two days ago. How could you even tell, the way things kept happening to you, maybe leaving their marks in ways you couldn't even see.

Megan Abbott

#19. The New Coach. Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else?

Megan Abbott

#20. We get a fat-slicked chocolate chip muffin, which we heat up in the rotating toaster machine. Standing next to it, the heat radiating off its coils, I imagine myself suffering eternal damnation for sins not yet clear.

Megan Abbott

#21. Here he is, the man who knows things and who should want to help me. But it is so hard to bring up things with any weight at all to a man like this. A man like this doesn't have real conversations.

Megan Abbott

#22. ...Devon wore the face of a stone Artemis.

Megan Abbott

#23. Then she said sometimes the ways boys need things so badly, like they could never stop needing, it almost scared her.

Megan Abbott

#24. He looked like he could tie a knot in a fire poker, eat it, and crap it out straight.

Megan Abbott

#25. They knew each other most deeply through body-warmed sheets and the tangle of half dreams.

Megan Abbott

#26. I have another friend who gets what I'm really like, and I get her. She scares me. Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?

Megan Abbott

#27. There wasn't much to know. Now there's less.

Megan Abbott

#28. Sexual debut. Sometimes it seemed to Deenie that high school was like a long game of And Then There Were None. Every Monday, another girl's debut.

Megan Abbott

#29. Running so hard, her breath stippled with pain to go faster, hit the grass harder, move forward faster, like she could break through something in front of her, something no one else saw.

Megan Abbott

#30. You have to decide who you are, little girl, she told me once. Once you know that, everyone else will too.

Megan Abbott

#31. Time to put on your miner's hat and headed toward the bright light.

Megan Abbott

#32. She wasn't just a B-girl, she was carrying the whole ugly world in her eyes.

Megan Abbott

#33. Bobby pins crunching under my feet, I walk through, surveying the damaged girlness.

Megan Abbott

#34. I think there are two prevailing views of the suburbs in the States: either they're this sort of tedious place, where everyone is the same, buys the same food and drives around in their little minivans, or the view is that the suburbs are extremely perverse in a humorous way.

Megan Abbott

#35. That she was both fearless and fragile and could be hurt badly in ways he could not fix.

Megan Abbott

#36. I figured I'd duck out ... before Goody Osbourne took the stand.

Megan Abbott

#37. She hadn't learned, no one had taught her ... that the things you want, you never get them. And if you do, they're not what you thought they'd be. But you'd still do anything to keep them. Because you'd wanted them for so long.

Megan Abbott

#38. This is my body, and I can make it do things. I can make it spin, flip, fly.

Megan Abbott

#39. I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels.

Megan Abbott

#40. I haven't had anything to drink in so long, I figured it'd be best to have something I'd probably never want two of.

Megan Abbott

#41. Sometimes, during those same bleak middle-of-the-nights, he held secret fears he never said aloud. Demons had come in the dark, come with the famous Dryden fog that rolled through the town, and taken possession of his lovely, smart, kindhearted wife. And next they'd come for his daughter too.

Megan Abbott

#42. Did you ever look out in that dark and fucked-up world out there and think, how do I let my daughter out into that? And how do i stop her? And the things you can't stop because you're ... because-

Megan Abbott

#43. Sometimes it felt like parenting amounted to a series of questionable decisions, one after another.

Megan Abbott

#44. It is simple as this: she has a complicated life and her clothes can't help but show it. It is all part of her unique disheveled glamour.

Megan Abbott

#45. You spend a long time waiting for life to start - the past year or two filled with all these firsts, everything new and terrifying and significant - and then it does start and you realize it isn't what you'd expected, or asked for.

Megan Abbott

#46. There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.

Megan Abbott

#47. When you realize, you have no idea what's going on in your kid's head? One morning, you wake up and there's this alien in your house. They look like your kid, sound a little like them, but they are not your kid. They're something else that you don't know.

Megan Abbott

#48. Then I thought maybe she did know but didn't want to look at it. Maybe she did know but there's all kinds of lies you tell yourself when you want to.

Megan Abbott

#49. Like all that you are is the wanting, and the rest of you just burns away?

Megan Abbott

#50. I know what that's like," he says. "The way you can be saved without ever knowing you were in trouble.

Megan Abbott

#51. Ages fourteen to eighteen, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something - anything - to begin.

Megan Abbott

#52. ...like my own granddad used to say, if you get down to the nub of it, people don't change.

That's not true, Katie thought. Not at all. Everyone changed, all the time. That was what was so hard.

Megan Abbott

#53. When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control it all.

Megan Abbott

#54. If we look at it from eye corners, or from places other than the center of our head, isn't there a kind of terrible beauty in it?

Megan Abbott

#55. Since then, he could only ever think about his sister, one wall away. And how he hoped Deenie never did things like this. With guys like him.

Megan Abbott

#56. Whenever I doubted myself, my dad would say, 'Grab that dream by the hands, Gwennie. Clutch until the knuckles go white.'" "Whose dream?" "It doesn't matter whose dream it is," she said. "Just that it's a dream.

Megan Abbott

#57. The pause that followed felt very important. It was one of those moments in a marriage when you have to make a critical decision with alarming speed and the consequences could last a long time, even forever.

Megan Abbott

#58. She said I'd better not make her unhappy because I oughta know that she's never unhappy alone.

Megan Abbott

#59. A second date always felt like an announcement at his age. And he never felt ready for the announcement.

Megan Abbott

#60. When she returned, there was Coach T. spinning

Megan Abbott

#61. But she became Gabby's friend in that way that can happen, because the girl with the cool boots always finds the girl with the occasional slash of pink in her hair. The two of them like a pair of exotic birds dipping over the school's water fountains - you knew they would find each other.

Megan Abbott

#62. I think it was Freud who said that we're all arrested at a certain age. For me, it was always 13.

Megan Abbott

#63. You never think your life will be that big. Just

Megan Abbott

#64. Looking at her, he could almost see the painted serpent squirming on her skin, ready to turn, mouth open.

Megan Abbott

#65. If you didn't feel it on your body long after he'd left, was it really worth laying for him? I wanted to feel that.

Megan Abbott

#66. People will always try to scare you into things. Scare you away from things. Scare you into not wanting things you can't help wanting. You can't be afraid.

Megan Abbott

#67. Suddenly,I want to hold the whole night close to my chest and I decide it is mine alone

Megan Abbott

#68. No, this is throwing up like coming off the tilt-a-whirl at age seven, like discovering that dead rat under the porch, like finding out someone you loved never loved you at all.

Megan Abbott