We Are All Guilty Here (North Falls, #1)

by Karin Slaughter

she missed the way she felt when her father put his arm around her shoulders, pulled her close to his side, made her feel safe.

Never to suffer would never to have been blessed.’” Emmy gave her a blank look. “Edgar Allan Poe,”

It’s always the quiet ones who’ll shiv you in the shower.”

“Every kid gets a different set of parents, even if they grow up in the same house.”

“A man has to prove himself once. A woman has to prove herself every day.”

You can’t choose something if you don’t know you have a choice.”

“They should call it fuckapause, because you run out of all the fucks you can give.”

raising girls could kill a man, but he had no idea how fucking hard it was to grow yourself into a woman.

“I think it’s a genetic predisposition,” Emmy said. “Like how some people think cilantro tastes like soap.” “That’s a variation on the olfactory receptor genes reacting to the aldehydes in the leaves.”

Sometimes, things just fucking suck,

She also knew that mistakes could be a reason to forgive.

“When people die, your relationship with them doesn’t end. You find new ways to connect with them.”

“Denial gets a bad rap, but it can be very helpful on a temporary basis. The problem starts when you stay in denial, because trauma doesn’t go away. It stores itself in the body, particularly with children. The more they try to force it down, the more ways the body finds to push it back out.”

“The stillness you’re talking about is a trauma response. There are only three responses you can have: fight, flight, or freeze. You know what flight is. You run away. Freezing is often described as disassociation. You mentally go somewhere else so you don’t have to process what’s happening to your body. With Virgil, your brain chose fight. Dopamine flooded the reward center to reinforce your behavior because it was good for your survival.”

“Feeling invincible can be a rush. The problem comes when you seek out those behaviors for the dopamine reward. You start pushing boundaries, putting yourself at risk, making bad decisions for the thrill of it, hurting yourself in the process.” “That sounds like addiction.” “That’s exactly like addiction. Both work on the same reward pathways.