Quotes from Megan Abbott

It's hard, he told her, when everyone wants it so much but you're the one who has to do it.

There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.

Back when Deenie was in middle school, she was always having sleepovers. All those girly thumping and trills on the other side of his bedroom wall confused and annoyed and stirred him, so he'd sneak down to the basement and page through a mildewed 1985 Playboy he'd found under the laundry chute. The pictures were startling and beautiful, but he always felt ashamed after, standing at the laundry sink where his mom scrubbed his uniform.

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

But I would never tell anyone that," Dr Severin adds, leaning forward once more. She smiles ruefully. "You can never tell a man or he'll think, Ah! That's what driver her. And that's a way to weaken her.

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

The raw, ugly, mottled things you fear about yourself in your most private moments--what happens when someone says them aloud to you? The feeling like your skin slipped from your body, showing everything, red and veined.

There is no team in I

the bad things you do become part of you, literally.

I was seventeen and there were so many things I didn't know yet, but I knew about hiding.

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

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.

To be capable of shutting the world out, even death itself, and surrendering to the body, trusting in its powers, its secrets. No feeling but this. No feeling

Its not that they want her. It's just they have this feeling, and they're off, Billy, they're way off, but they have this sense that, somehow behind that knockout face of hers, she's more like the women they see on the job, on patrol, on a case, in the precint house. Women with stories as long as their rap sheets, as their dangling legs…

There's something crazily beautiful about it, the banks of stacked illuminated signs- Sauna Hut, Sheer Elegance, Waterbeds USA, Chiropractic Here, Benihana, Ideal Uniform- gorse rolling from curbed island to curbed island, across the endless parking lots like suburban tumbleweed. Last week, I watched one roll over a lit cigarette, flaring brightly. If there'd been anything natural in its path, it might have started a fire.

When you gaze into the Abyss, the Abyss gazes into you. (~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche)

As Katie moved through the rooms, everything reminded her of everything:

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 finding North.

how often do you realize something's a choice when you make it?

You can't let your guard down. If you can control yourself, you can control everyone else.

He shook his head, again with that smile that didn't show his teeth. It was the smile of a man who hadn't been surprised in a very long time but who felt like he was finally going to be surprised again and was enjoying it.

Consider the exquisite torture of all those little girls never allowed to eat dancing as costumed Sugar Plums, as fat Bonbons gushing cherry slicks. Tutus like ribbon candy, boys spinning great hoops of peppermint, and everywhere black slathers of licorice and marzipan glistening like snow.

Many of these men, and the women too, sometimes even more so, would like to use your heart against you," she says. "They think it's a ticking time bomb in your chest, waiting to explode." "Maybe it is," Diane blurts out. I look at her. Severin smiles. "Maybe that's our strength.

She had done this thing to me, burdened me with this vile, howling thing. And now it shuddered in me always and I'd felt I might have to live with it forever. I was right.