Quotes from Megan Abbott

He'd tried to explain it to her, how accidents happen but we really are safe. But there was, already, the sense that nothing he said touched what was really bothering her, which was the realization that you can't stop bad things from happening to other people, other things. And that would be hard forever. He'd never quite gotten used to it himself.

It's enraging, recalling a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times in my life a man telling me to relax, be a team player, stop worrying so much, take it easy and roll with the punches. We're all on the same team.

This was their favorite place to meet. It always felt hidden, forgotten. The gold-lettered World Book encyclopedias from the 1980s. The smell of old glue and crumbling paper, the industrial carpet burning her palms. It reminded her of what you did when you were a little girl, making little burrows and hideaways. Like boys did with forts. Eli and his friend, stacking sofa cushions, pretending to be sharpshooters. With girls, you didn't call them forts, though it was the same.

I still feel like teenage girls are not taken seriously by the culture at large, especially not their darker or more complicated feelings—of aggression, desire, ambition. To me, these feelings and drives are so fundamental to girlhood and to womanhood, and I love exploring them. And trying to give voice to them as best I can. I think women are always trying to figure out their own adolescence. We never stop.

I always feel lifted the minute I taste real air. The minute I see the sun-scorched signs, the swaying traffic-lights. The lab is gone. But not tonight, it seems. Tonight all I can think of is Diane Fleming rolling into town, starting fires.

that was when it happened. A click of her jaw, like a pit bull's or cobra's unlocking

Whenever I doubted myself, my dad would say, 'Grab that dream by the hands, Gwennie. Clutch until the knuckles go white.'" "Whose dream?" "It doesn't matter whose dream it is," she said. "Just that it's a dream.

He looked like he could tie a knot in a fire poker, eat it, and crap it out straight.

Bad things happen and then they're over, but where do they go?

Sometimes, during those same bleak middle-of-the-nights, he held secret fears he never said aloud. Demons had come in the dark, come with the famous Dryden fog that rolled through the town, and taken possession of his lovely, smart, kindhearted wife. And next they'd come for his daughter too.

Here he is, the man who knows things and who should want to help me. But it is so hard to bring up things with any weight at all to a man like this. A man like this doesn't have real conversations.

Once, a few weeks ago, she'd heard a girl's voice in there and wondered if it was porn on the computer until she could tell it wasn't. She heard the voice say Eli's name. E-liii. She'd turned her music as loud as she could, held her hands to her ears, even sang to herself, eyes clamped shut. She hoped he heard her fling off her Ked so hard it hit the wall. She hoped he remembered she was here.

About Devon, about the lonesomeness of her daughter's life, about—

No way," he said, shaking his head, shaking the image of Lise, bare-legged, her skirt hitched high, from his thoughts. "Lise, she's a sister to me." "Oh," she said, fingertips making circles just above the waist of her skirt. Wider and wider circles. "A sister," he repeated. He looked at her. There was something scratching again, in the corner above his eye, like those metal probes at the dentist clawing at your teeth.

I can't deny that I desired her in that moment. Anyone would have.

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.

Sometimes it feels like life's about understanding how much opposites meet. Kill to cure, poison to immunize, sacrifice to save.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.   

You must never be fearful when what you're doing is right.

You never think your life will be that big.    Just

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

I figured I'd duck out....before Goody Osbourne took the stand.

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. I hated her. And I felt closer to her than ever. Goddamn her.

You really only learn your place, her mother once said, when you're left in it.