Quotes from Megan Abbott

Something was consuming the girl. I need help. She thought of her in that interview room, slightly breathless and entrancing. Wanting desperately to be told that nothing was her fault, that her body and brain had conspired against her. The feeling she must have, always, of being in between worlds, the worlds separated only by an impenetrable pane of glass.

When you get away with something it's yours only, forever. Heavy and irremediable.

My head is so full of plans that it seems aflame.

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

But maybe I cared too, because sometimes I found myself wondering about those things. I just didn't show it. It was high school; you didn't show things.

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-

she told me her secret. And showed me what darkness was, and is, and how it works, and how it never goes away or ends.

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

Walking past all the cops, all the detectives, I raise my runner's shirt a few inches, like I'm shaking it loose form my damp skin. I let them all see my stomach, its tautness. I let everyone see I'm not afraid, and that I'm not anything but a silly cheerleader, a feather-bodied sixteen-year-old with no more sense than a marshmellow peep. I let them see I'm not anything. least of all what I am.

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.

The world is a fiction the brain constructs

In this life," she said, crossing these glorious gams, shimmering in the filmy light, "you can't let your guard down. If you can control yourself, you can control everyone else.

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.

Beautiful, he says, and she could titrate like a motherfucker.

Because the bad things you do become part of you, literally. This is no metaphor. They become part of you on a cellular level, in the blood.

are women so much more ferocious in their violence?

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.

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.

Women have to live so much of their life in the in-betweens.

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

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.

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

never replied to forevers. Life was long, and full of surprises.

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.