sav > sav's Quotes

“But what you need to understand, my darling," she whispers, "is that this little taste your daughter has had is a taste of what could be. She’s swallowed it. It’s inside her now.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“You want me to be a tragic backdrop so that you can appear to be illuminated, so that people can say ‘Wow, isn’t he so terribly brave to love a girl who is so obviously sad?’ You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.”
― Warsan Shire

“Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and the 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? Could she see past all of that to something else, something quivering and real, something poised to be transformed, turned out, made? See that she could make us, stick her hands in our glitter-gritted insides and build us into magnificent teen gladiators?”
― Megan Abbott

“I was not a lovable child, and I'd grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it'd be a scribble with fangs.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“My alone feels so good, I'll only have you if you're sweeter than my solitude.”
― Warsan Shire

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, Queenpin

“Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you'd think all women do is clean and bleed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Pretend you're me," she says. I can barely see her over the frothy mound.

And it happens just like that.
A feeling of sinking, a falling deep inside.
And I'm her.

And this is my house, and Matt French is my husband, tallying columns all day, working late into the night for me, for me.
And here I am, my tight, my perfect body, my pretty, perfect face, and nothing could ever be wrong with me, or my life, not even the sorrow that is plainly
right there in the center of it. Oh, Colette, it's right there in the center of you, and some kind of despair too. Colette--

--that silk sucking into my mouth, the weight of it now, and I can't catch my breath, my breath.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“Somewhere in the gluey Nyquil haze, the memory came of standing in the lake with Lise the week before, stomping their feet in the emerald thick of the water. On the shoreline were Skye’s hard-jeaned boys with their disappearing tattoos. They whistled at Lise, fingers hooked in their mouths. Let’s do it, Lise whispered in her ear, her tongue showing between her teeth. Let’s go in. When she woke up, in the purple of four a.m., she could still hear Lise’s voice in her ear, high as a little girl’s. We went behind those tall bushes. He took my tights off first. It was so cold, but his hands—”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“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.”
― Megan Abbott

“Looking at her, he could almost see the painted serpent squirming on her skin, ready to turn, mouth open.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“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-”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“A few years ago, long after it had been closed, Eli said he saw a girl swimming in it, coming out of the water in a bikini, laughing at her frigthtened boyfriend, seaweed snaking around her. He said she looked like a mermaid.

Deenie always pictured it like in one of those books of mythology she used to love, a girl rising from the foam gritted with pearls, mussels, the glitter of the sea.

"It looks beautiful", her mother had said once when they were driving by at night, its waters opaline. “It is beautiful. But it makes people sick.”

To Deenie, it was one of many interesting things that adults said would kill you: Easter lilles, jellyfish, copperhead snakes with their diamond heads, tails bright as sulfur. Don't touch, don't taste, don't get too close.

And then, last week.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“Since then, he could only ever think about his sister, one wall away. And how he hoped Deenie never did things like this. With guys like him.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“She’d inherited Eli’s old phone and often got texts meant for him. One night, that senior girl who always talked about ballet and wore leotards and jeans to school texted twenty-four times. One of the texts had said—Deenie never forgot it—MY PUSSY ACHES FOR U. It had to have been the worst thing she’d ever read. She’d read it over and over before deleting it.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“Once, a few weeks ago, she’d heard a girl’s voice in there and wondered if it was porn on the computer until she could tell it wasn’t. She heard the voice say Eli’s name. E-liii. She’d turned her music as loud as she could, held her hands to her ears, even sang to herself, eyes clamped shut. She hoped he heard her fling off her Ked so hard it hit the wall. She hoped he remembered she was here.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“It was the best night ever.
And they hadn't talked about any of it since.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“Finally Victoria sighs and says, “Julia, I’d be happy if you told me just enough of the facts so I could imagine it. So I could recreate it for myself. So I could imagine that I was really there.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal

“There’s no such thing as innocence any more," the girl said, "there’s only ignorance. You think you are holding on to something pure, but you aren’t. You’re just ignorant. You are handicapped by everything you don’t yet know.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal

“When the lights go out, the parents cry and ask each other what did he do to her, but the girls are burning with a question of their own: what did she do? What does she know now that makes her so dangerous, like the slow amber leak of a noxious fume?”
― Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal