"She must have already forgiven him for leaving her behind. Girls were good at colouring in those disappointing blank spots. I thought of the night before, her exaggerated moans."
- Emma Cline
"A lot of things in the house were broken or forgotten: the kitchen clock stopped, a closet doorknob coming off in my hand. The sparkly mess of flies I'd swept from the corners. It took sustained, cons..."
"The man was bearing down on me. My hands were limp and wet. Please, I thought. Please. Who was I addressing? The man? God? Whoever handled these things."
". . . even the surprise of harmless others in the house disturbed me. I didn't want my inner rot on display, even accidentally. Living alone was frightening in that way. No one to police the spill of ..."
"It pained me to imagine how our twosome appeared to others, marked as those kind of girls who belonged to each other. Those sexless fixtures of high school."
"I'd always liked her in a way I never had to think about, like the fact of my own hands."
"Money is ego, and people won't give it up. Just want to protect themselves, hold on to it like a blanket. They don't realize it keeps them slaves. It's sick" "What's funny is that as soon as you give ..."
"At that age I looked at women with brutal and emotionless judgement. Assessing the slope of their breasts, imagining how they would look in very crude positions."
"But it was something else, too, that I wanted to extend: the taut and pleasant silence in the car, the stale heat raising vapours of leather. The warped image of myself in the side mirrors, so I caugh..."
"Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved. They noticed what we want noticed.And that's what I did for Tamar, I responded to her symbo..."