Quotes from Megan Abbott

you will have to fight your entire life. And that's why you'll always be better. Because you wanted it so much more.

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

The men's gazes are heavy on us. Heavy and pointed, three dull sabers to our chests. They would be high-fiving if it were them. Crowing and banging tabletops. We don't move or even smile.

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.

Give me your hand," she says, offering hers. "Hurry now.

You're going to look your girl straight in the eye and say, Baby your mom rode to the rafters. Your mom lifted three girls in her hand, grinning all the way, she says, our voices rising to a baying now, all together. Your mom build pyramids and flew high in the sky, and back in Sutton Grove, they're still talking about the wonders they saw that night, still talking about how they watched us all reach to the heavens.

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

It's that powerful, this thing we share. A murky history, its narrative near impenetrable. We keep telling it to ourselves, noting its twists and turns, trying to make sense of it. And hiding it from everyone else.

It's just nature," I point out, wiping my lab bench, the sweet smell of the ethanol solvent. "Put animals in a small, closed space, and the one with the sharpest nails, the pointiest teeth wins." He gins. "Or maybe it's just like musical chairs?" It's a luxury to view it so lightly. But I nod. It's best never to let them see your teeth.

I picture him always like he's looking at us through glass—windshields, sliding patio doors.

So many things you never think you'll do until you do them.

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

My mom always says, you don't have a self until you have a secret.

The world is blood-hot and personal. —Sylvia Plath

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

The memories come in pieces. Little bits of grit too small to pick up even with a wetted finer, too small even to hold in my gaze.

That's your shadow, my mom told me once. You need it more than you think.

Because---and this was the first time I understood this--- everyone always like the best, wants the most, admires deeply, the girl who's just out of reach. The girl no one can touch, really. We don't know why we're drawn, but it's unstoppable.

time to put on your miner's hat and headed toward the bright light.

Women have always been far less violent than men, the author conceded. The facts speak for themselves. But why, then, he asked, are women so much more ferocious in their violence? It has always seemed to me that the answer lies in the question.

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

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

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

This girl, this girl, and he a man with a business and a secretary and a house with a furnace and bills and a son and a roof with three shingles and a pretty birdpath made of stone that I sometimes see Mrs.Shaw, her tied back with a scarf, cleaning with a dainty skimmer. How does this man, a man like this, like any of them, come to walk at night and stand in a girl's backyard, and then, smoking and looking up, suddenly feel himself helpless to bher bright magic?