Quotes from Megan Abbott

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.

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

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

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.

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?

The drone in my ear, it's like the tornado drill in elementary school, the hand-cranked siren that rang mercilessly, all of us hunched over on ourselves, facing the basement walls, heads tucked into our chests. Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever

She was the one who showed me all the dark wonders of life, the real life, the life I'd only seen flickering from the corner of my eye. Did I ever feel anything at all until she showed me what feeling meant? Pushing at the corners of her cramped world with curled fists, she showed me what it meant to live.

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

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

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.

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

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

Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you're a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet.

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