Quotes from Megan Abbott

And no sound from outside or anywhere. That must be the thing when you have money, I think. You never have to hear anything you don't want to, ever.

Reproductive hormones and serotonin, stress hormones and neurotransmitters. The whole rickety biological pathophysiology of our women. The PMDD women, maybe all women. She sees the dangerous relays in the suffering body. She understands the mad pulses of the blood.

The hardest thing in this world is finding out what you're capable of.

When you're in the sciences, when you know about things like neuronal biochemistry and the complex interplay between, say, hormones and emotion, you might imagine you have a deep understanding of the mind. 'Explain to me why I feel this way, think this way, dream this way, am this way.' But consider it: Would you really want to know?

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.

Two people, tightly twined, can begin to convince themselves of anything. There's reality and then there's the shared experience, which feels so much more real. Two people, needing each other, can come to believe things. Can come to believe wanting something was the same as making it happen. That it wasn't a choice, in the end, but the right thing to do, the fulfillment of some deeper calling.

Freud wrote about it a century ago. How we rummage through the armory of the past to retrieve the weapons needed to repeat, repeat, repeat past traumas. He said it was primitive, instinctual, destructive. Like a demon inside us all.

Remember that kind of wanting? That kind that's just for yourself? And you don't even have to feel guilty about it? You wouldn't know you should." Katie

A professor once described the brain to me as a great silent vault. A dark theater with nothing. playing on the screen. Just electrical charges bouncing corner to corner, like lightbulbs flashing off and on.

The world is a fiction the brain constructs. The smell of a fresh peach, the punch of a firefly in the night sky. The lilting hush-hush of a first lullaby. The brain fashions it all and we don't know how or why.

Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good. —KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

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

Love is a kind of killing, Addy," she says. "Don't you know that?

Ages fourteen to eighteen, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something — anything — to begin.

If it hadn't been what it was, it would've been beautiful.

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 feather and claws, it's blood sacrifice.

The more I did it?the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high. It was something. Don't say it wasn't.

People will always try to scare you into things. Scare you away from things. Scare you into not wanting things you can't help wanting. You can't be afraid.

Where'd that world go, that world when you're a kid, and now I can't remember noticing anything, not the smell of the leaves or the sharp curl of dried maple on your ankles, walking? I live in cars now, and my own bedroom, the windows sealed shut, my mouth to my phone, hand slick around its neon jelly case, face closed to the world, heart closed to everything.

She said I'd better not make her unhappy because I oughta know that she's never unhappy alone.

I have another friend who gets what I'm really like, and I get her. She scares me. Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?

She hadn't learned, no one had taught her ... 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.

we're all wanting things we don't understand. things we can't even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions over our hearts.

I was so mad when I was younger," she said. "And then you grow up and think you're not that girl anymore. The girl you were at fifteen, sixteen. Angry and nasty. Hungry for love—" "—I guess some girls are like that," Katie said, cooly. "But the thing is, you're always that girl," Hailey said, stepping out of the car. "She never goes away. She's inside you all the time. That girl is forever.