Quotes from Megan Abbott

I didn't grow up feeling smart and special, the world my oyster, born with a silver shucker in my hand. No one works harder than you, that's the way Zell and Juwon liked to put it. Everything I have is because I was the dutiful worker bee or because I have no other things to distract me, like girlfriends or wives, like mewling kids or family dogs or a love of weekend brunches and fantasy football, or a single, sad hobby, like solitaire or the Sunday jumble. I have this.

I choose to excel, not compete - do you? I choose to make changes, not excuses - do you? To be motivated, not manipulated. To be useful, not used. I choose to live by choice, not by chance - do you?

That's what people never understand: They see us hard little pretty things, brightly lacquered and sequin-studded, and they laugh, they mock, they arouse themselves. They miss everything. You see, these glitters and sparkle dusts and magicks? It's war paint, it's feathers and claws, it's blood sacrifice.

But she became Gabby's friend in that way that can happen, because the girl with the cool boots always finds the girl with the occasional slash of pink in her hair. The two of them like a pair of exotic birds dipping over the school's water fountains—you knew they would find each other.

She'd inherited Eli's old phone and often got texts meant for him. One night, that senior girl who always talked about ballet and wore leotards and jeans to school texted twenty-four times. One of the texts had said—Deenie never forgot it—MY PUSSY ACHES FOR U. It had to have been the worst thing she'd ever read. She'd read it over and over before deleting it.

I think you should shut the fuck up," Eli said, throwing his bag down with a thud that made everyone on the lab look up. "I think it's time you do that." Stim looked at him carefully. Eyes darting between the two of them, A.J. seemed to be waiting for something, grinning a little. Stim shrugged. "Lise isn't your sister, Nash," he said. "They're not all your sisters.

in the end all the things you think matter are just disappointment and noise.

You spend a long time waiting for life to start – her past year or two filled with all these firsts, everything new and terrifying and significant – and then it does start and you realise it isn't what you'd expected, or asked for.

Remember this," she says, glowing, her skin golden and life-marked, "you will have to fight your entire life. And that's why you'll always be better. Because you wanted it so much more.

I haven't had anything to drink in so long, I figured it'd be best to have something I'd probably never want two of.

What lies behind two such expert poker faces? I wonder. For different reasons, for reasons professional or emotional, they likely have spent most or all of their lives wearing masks, cool and aloof and impenetrable. It serves them in the lab, in the research community, in our profession. It serves them, period. Not me. Not me.

Maybe the ending was the best part - the only time you saw the beauty in it all.

Devon wore the face of a stone Artemis.

There is something bad here, growing. Day and night I watch it. Growing. —Sophocles, Electra

And the family that seemed so perfect began to suffer through small and then large tragedies—a wayward sister gone more wayward, the parents' separation and then divorce, and, most terrible of all, the death of Meg's older brother in a boating accident. There's something so intense about these relationships we have with other families during our formative years, and that's one of the main things I wanted to explore in The End of Everything.

Dr. Severin was thinking that the brain was a monstrous and beautiful thing. A ravishing chaos.

Then I thought maybe she did know but didn't want to look at it. Maybe she did know but there's all kinds of lies you tell yourself when you want to.

like my own granddad used to say, if you get down to the nub of it, people don't change. That's not true, Katie thought. Not at all. Everyone changed, all the time. That was what was so hard.

Now that I'm caught up in it, I feel a whiff of panic. This is Diane. And just as before, we are thrown together, and just as before, we want the same thing. A prize, dangling.

We are never deceived," she says, her voice deep and ringing. "We deceive ourselves.

When your mom is gone, the thing no one ever tells you is that the little compass needle inside keeps spinning around and around, never finingt North.

Ballet was full of dark fairy tales, and how a dancer prepared her pointe shoes was a ritual as mysterious and private as how she might pleasure herself. It was often indistinguishable.

When she returned, there was Coach T. spinning

We get a fat-slicked chocolate chip muffin, which we heat up in the rotating toaster machine. Standing next to it, the heat radiating off its coils, I imagine myself suffering eternal damnation for sins not yet clear.