Megan Abbott Quotes

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.

Things can get pretty rough out there," he says. "Can't they? For you girls? You're all a bunch of warriors, aren't you? Lionhearted.

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

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

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.

I think there are two prevailing views of the suburbs in the States: either they're this sort of tedious place, where everyone is the same, buys the same food and drives around in their little minivans, or the view is that the suburbs are extremely perverse in a humorous way.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

„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?

If you didn't feel it on your body long after he'd left, was it really worth laying for him? I wanted to feel that.

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

A month or so ago, he and his friends had gone to Pizza House for slices after a game and he'd seen her in the kitchen. Her cap pushed back, she was carrying cold trays of glistening dough rounds, and her face had a kind of pink to it, her hips turning to knock the freezer door shut.
I didn't spit on it, Deenie had promised, winking at him from behind the scarlet heat lamps. He'd stood there, arrested. The pizza box hot in his hands. She looked different than at school and especially at home, and she was acting differently. Moving differently.
He couldn't stop watching her, his friends all around him, loud and triumphant, their faces streaked with sweat.

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.

Did you ever look out in that dark and fucked-up world out there and think, how do I let my daughter out into that? And how do i stop her? And the things you can't stop because you're ... because-

It is simple as this: she has a complicated life and her clothes can't help but show it. It is all part of her unique disheveled glamour.

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.

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.

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

She has so much pride that, even if I'm weary of her, of her fighting ways, her gauntlet-tossing, I can't say there isn't something else that beams in me. An old ember licked to fresh fire again. Beth, the old Beth, before high school, before Ben Trammel, all the boys and self-sorrow, the divorce and the adderall and the suspensions.

That Beth at the bike racks, third grade, her braids dangling, her chin up, fists knotted around a pair of dull scissors, peeling into Brady Carr's tire. Brady Carr, who shoved me off the spinabout, tearing a long strip of skin from my ankle to my knee.

Tugging the rubber from his tire, her fingernails ripped red, she looked up at me, grinning wide, front-teeth gapped and wild heroic.

How could you ever forget that?

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.

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.

Suddenly,I want to hold the whole night close to my chest and I decide it is mine alone

Because they do burn leaves here, the older folks do, and I remember now that I love it and always have. The way fall feels at night because of it, because of the crackling sound and walking around the sidewalks, like when you're a kid, and kicking those soft piles, and seeing smoke from backyards and Mr. Kilstrap standing over the metal drum with the holes in the top, the sparking embers at his feet.

When you realize, you have no idea what's going on in your kid's head? One morning, you wake up and there's this alien in your house. They look like your kid, sound a little like them, but they are not your kid. They're something else that you don't know.

I think it was Freud who said that we're all arrested at a certain age. For me, it was always 13.

In some animal part of my brain, I guess I thought looking her up might somehow summon her. So I never did. And she came anyway.

There was a wonder in it, and who needs to talk of such wonders? We nestle them away, deep in the fury at the center of us, where things can be held tightly, protected, and secretly cherished as a special notion we once held, then had to stow away.

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

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

You have to decide who you are, little girl, she told me once. Once you know that, everyone else will too.

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.

Skye said when she looked at Lise, she saw a black mark, an aura. Just like the mark on Lise's thigh, it was a warming. Deenie thought of it now, of Lise and the stretch mark on her thigh. And how the fevered mind of her fevered friend might believe anything. But also, somewhere inside, it felt the smallest bit true. That the stretch mark was a kind of witch's mark, the blot of Lise's body that reminded you of what she had been -a plump, awkward girl- before the lithesome beauty took her place.
It was a kind of witchcraft, that transformation.

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

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.

I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.

Running so hard, her breath stippled with pain to go faster, hit the grass harder, move forward faster, like she could break through something in front of her, something no one else saw.

Like all that you are is the wanting, and the rest of you just burns away?

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.

Sometimes he wished he didn't have a sister, though he loved Deenie and still remembered the feeling he had when he caught that kid Ethan pushing her off the swing set in the school yard in fifth grade. And how time seemed to speed up until he was shoving the kid into the fence and tearing his jacket. The admiring look his sister gave him after, the way his parents pretended to be mad at him but he could tell they weren't.
These days, it was pretty different. There'd be those moments he was forced to think about her not just as Deenie but as the girl whose slender tank tops hung over the shower curtain. Like bright streamers, like the flair the cheerleaders threw at games.
Sometimes he wished he didn't have a sister.

That she was both fearless and fragile and could be hurt badly in ways he could not fix.

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.

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.
And now we know it's true. The brain itself is built with the battered beams of our early years. What the conscious mind forgets, the neurons remember.

But it only makes visible a darkness that's already there. Maybe eating it like that ... " She looked at Deenie, her voice like a pulse in Deenie's brain. "Maybe you bring the darkness inside you. Maybe Lise has it inside her now.

The New Coach. Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else?

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

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

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.

It felt like you could hurt her just by looking at her, or you could never hurt her at all.

Bobby pins crunching under my feet, I walk through, surveying the damaged girlness.

Something in the way he fastened his eyes on me, it was like he had something for me.

But here's the thing: I couldn't believe the fast jolt it gave me. He wasn't the type to set me going, but there was something. Something in the way he stood there, like a king, manicured hand curling around the edge of the bar like it was the arm of his throne, watching everything, appraising.

And knowing something about me, knowing it.

Who could guess, really, how much he might know about me.

So sure, I gave him my best walk, half class, half pay-broad. If you can twist those two tightly, fellas don't know what hit 'em. They can't peg you. It gets them - the smart ones - going. Spinning hard trying to fix you. You're like the best parts of their grammar school sweetheart and their first whore all in one sizzling package.

Women have to live so much of their life in the in-betweens.

I think she might cry. In her way, she is.

This sensible, sensible girl. A girl who knew how to protect herself. Never a daredevil, never stunting without a safety mat, without spotters. A girl for whom instability was the ultimate enemy. Who'd never known divorce or slamming doors or slamming fists. A girl whose home was a peaceful sanctum, even the basement padded. A life that had to be made safe because of the risks she put her body through. She was the most dangerous thing in her own life. Her body, the only dangerous thing.

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

No, this is throwing up like coming off the tilt-a-whirl at age seven, like discovering that dead rat under the porch, like finding out someone you loved never loved you at all.

Being a girl is so hard, Katie thought. And it only gets harder. The

The pause that followed felt very important. 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.

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?

They watch her when she comes to City Hall, they watch her at the social events, they watch the way she walks, hips rolling with no suggestion of provocation but with every sense that she knows more than any of the rest. A woman like that, they seem to be thinking, a woman like that has lived.
Their wives from Orange County, they come from Minnesota or Dallas or St.Louis. They come from places with families, with sagging mothers and fathers with dead eyes and heavy-hanging brows. They carry their own promise of future slackness and clipped lips and demands. They have sisters, sisther with more babies, babies with sweet saliva hanging and more appliance and with husbands with better salaries and two cars and club membership. They iron in housedresses in front of the television set or by the radio, steam rising, matting their faces, as the children with the damp necks cling on them, sticky-handed. They are this. And Alice ... and Alice ...

Had the water done something? Did it do something to me? She wondered. Do I look different? Then she remembered asking herself that question before, two days ago. How could you even tell, the way things kept happening to you, maybe leaving their marks in ways you couldn't even see.

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.

...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.

By telling me, you trapped me," I say through my teeth. "By telling you," she whispers, rain still glistening on her, "I was free.

We never know, none of us, what love'll do to us.

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

Reading Tomato Red-the first Daniel Woodrell novel I came upon-was a transformative experience. It expanded my sense of the possibilities not only of crime fiction, but of fiction itself-of language, of storytelling. Time and again, his work just dazzles and humbles me. God bless Busted Flush for these glorious reissues. It's a service to readers everywhere, and a great gift.

Something was consuming the girl. I need help. She thought of her in that interview room, slightly breathless and entrancing. Wanting desperately to be told that nothing was her fault, that her body and brain had conspired against her. The feeling she must have, always, of being in between worlds, the worlds separated only by an impenetrable pane of glass.

She will not sit down after, when we all collapse on the mats, our sweaty limbs crisscrossing. She will not sit down, will not let the steel slip from between her shoulders. She has so much pride that, even if I'm weary of her, of her fighting ways, her gauntlet-tossing, I can't say there isn't something else that beams in me. An old ember licked to fresh fire again. Beth, the old Beth, before high school, before Ben Trammel, all the boys and self-sorrow, the divorce and the adderall and the suspensions.

You looked like you knew a thing or two, she told me later. But were ready to learn a lot more.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But maybe I cared too, because sometimes I found myself wondering about those things. I just didn't show it. It was high school; you didn't show things.

There wasn't much to know. Now there's less.

I feel a shaking in me, and it's the ground. It's like the ground is shaking and I will slip through.
Then, in a flash, his hands reach out and, like in a movie, really, the coffee cup falls to the cement steps with a sharp crack, and he grabs my arms and his face is filled with everything that is urgent and loving and meaningful in the world.
I feel so powerful, like a god, thunderbolt in hand.
And my thunderbolt hit.

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

I saw it all," Skye continued. "You should've seen the things your brother was doing to her." Deenie felt something crack and twist at her temple. "What? What did you say?"
"Your brother going down on your Lise. Lise's leg twitching like a dog's." Deenie felt her neck stiffen to wood, her hand leaping to it. She couldn't stop it, or Skye. Why Skye would say
"She seemed to love it," Skye said, jaw out, her lips white. "She didn't care who saw. Your brother didn't either."
"You shut the fuck up. You don't know what you're talking about. It wasn't my brother," Deenie said. "Stop saying that. It wasn't him.

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.

I know what that's like," he says. "The way you can be saved without ever knowing you were in trouble.