"Money is ego, and people won't give it up. Just want to protect themselves, hold onto it like a blanket. They don't realize it makes them slaves. It's sick."
- Emma Cline
"We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves we hid from them - they would never sense the lack or even know there was something more..."
"Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words l..."
"We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves that we hid from them - they would never sense the lack or even know there was something..."
"Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of live. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs ..."
"Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you."
"It was a gift. What did I do with it? Life didn't accumulate as I'd once imagined. I graduated from boarding school, two years of college. Persisted through the blank decade in Los Angeles. I buried f..."
"I was almost a wife but lost the man. I was almost recognisable as a friend. And then I wasn't. The nights when I flicked off the bedside lamp and found myself in the heedless, lonely dark. The times ..."
"A rock, I thought crazily. He'll pick up a rock. He'll break open my skull, my brain leaking onto the sand. He'll tighten his hands around my throat until my wind-pipe collapses. The stupid things I t..."
"The only teenagers in town seemed to kill themselves in gruesomely rural ways—I heard about their pickups crashing at two in the morning, the sleepover in the garage camper ending in carbon monoxide p..."