Quotes from Megan Abbott

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

I'm always surprised at the negative response to the women in my books who are openly ambitious or experience aggression.

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.

Reading Dorothy B. Hughes's novel 'In a Lonely Place' for the first time is like finding the long-lost final piece to an enormous puzzle. Within its Spanish bungalows, its eucalyptus-scented shadows, you feel as though you've discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing page-turner with sneakily subversive undercurrents.

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.

It felt like you could hurt her just by looking at her, or you could never hurt her at all.

The fear all men have that there's something inside us that shifts, and turns. A living thing, once dormant, stirring now, and filled with rage.

But the truth is, you can rarely undo things. This is what you realize after one of your parents dies.

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

Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?

We're all the same under our skin, aren't we? We're all wanting things we don't understand. Things we can't even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions over our hearts.

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

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

There was a wonder in it, and who needs to talk of such wonders? We nestle them away, deep in the fury at the center of us, where things can be held tightly, protected, and secretly cherished as a special notion we once held, then had to stow away.

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

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?

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.

She looks down at me, her eyes depthful and ruinous. "Love is a kind of killing, Addy,' she says. 'Don't you know that?

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.

We never know, none of us, what love'll do to us.

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

Things can get pretty rough out there," he says. "Can't they? For you girls? You're all a bunch of warriors, aren't you? Lionhearted.

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

In some animal part of my brain, I guess I thought looking her up might somehow summon her. So I never did. And she came anyway.