Quotes from Jess Lourey

And once I opened up all that real estate where before I'd been holding anger and regret, I found a lot of things were simpler than I'd made them.

He watched a lot of TV. I guess many people did. Maybe like him, they preferred their lives delivered to them in a box.

The trick of life," she said, "is that you can't hold the pain for too long. The magic, either.

You'll recognize those men, the ones inclined to their dark side, because they'll expect you to carry their load. They'll smother your anger with their pain, they'll make you doubt yourself, and they'll tell you they love you the whole time. Some do it big, like Ed, but most do it in quiet steps, like your father.

in the future, you might not want to wear so much makeup. You don't want to attract the wrong kind of attention." Maureen's shoulders tightened. "Why don't you tell them to stop looking instead of us to stop shining?

there's no point in mourning mistakes when you can fix them

I'd been thirteen, not stupid, though a lot of people confuse the two.

Small-town kids are pebbles in a river, pushed around by the flow, forming pockets and piles, reforming when the current picks up and we find ourselves in a whole new cluster.

Men in packs can do terrible things, things they wouldn't have the hate to do alone. It's no excuse, just something you should know.

He wore his anger like knives, and you didn't want them aimed at you.

Every woman should have pearls," Mom said, "to remind ourselves that grit under pressure becomes beauty.

I heard the distaste in her voice, the disdain for people who lived in trailers. She wouldn't say it out loud, but there it was. I wanted to ask her what she thought of people who lived in houses with scary drunks, but I didn't. Those sorts of questions only made her angry.

There's also the truth that 70 percent of serial killer victims are female. You better believe that knowing you're prey heightens your interest in the predator. You find yourself desperate to make sense of largely random acts of serial murder, believing that if you can understand motivation and hunting patterns, you can protect yourself.

While their beneficence ensured no one they approved of ever went hungry, sick or homeless in Lilydale, they also used their influence to control the local population, harass those who stepped out of line and create a culture of fear that had neighbors telling on neighbors.

There's about a hundred shades of green in a Minnesota summer, light like celery, deep like emeralds. You wouldn't think one color could have so many different flavors.

I knew him from one of my dad's parties, knew him better than I wanted to.

It felt like ink and stars and magic, and I never wanted it to end.

As far as she could tell, men didn't have close friendships, not like women did, but they still had that human need for connection. Every movie and TV show and magazine article told them it was their job to go out and grab what they wanted at the same time it told them that women were theirs for the taking.

All this time I'd thought of Aunt Jin as a hero. Well, here's something you should know: heroes are willing to pause their own lives to help you. Jin wasn't that. She was a regular person.

Historian Peter Vronsky hypothesizes that while several factors must align to make a murderer (genetics and frontal lobe injuries being two common ones), World War II was responsible for this golden age of serial killers a generation later.

I let the fireflies lead the way, dancing just ahead of me, sparkling as I passed and then dimming to nothing.

Evie had swallowed that like it belonged to her and went right back to whatever she was working on. Then, later that day, I was walking behind her as she told a fifth grader in outdated bell-bottoms that he wore them with "a flair and a flourish" all his own. I liked that a whole lot about Evie, how she passed on her treasures.

In our neighborhood, the problem wasn't the person who made the mistake; it was the person who acknowledged the truth.

They weren't misguided, these men who couldn't take a hint, who kept at a woman who was clearly uninterested. They were broken. Few of them would go so far as kidnapping, sure, but every one of them was after someone they could make feel less than, someone they imagined was beneath them, and they believed every woman was beneath them.