Dare Me Quotes

“There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“Love is a kind of killing, Addy," she says. "Don't you know that?”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“If it hadn't been what it was, it would've been beautiful.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“That’s what people never understand: They see us hard little pretty things, brightly lacquered and sequin-studded, and they laugh, they mock, they arouse themselves. They miss everything. You see, these glitters and sparkle dusts and magicks? It’s war paint, it’s feather and claws, it’s blood sacrifice.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“The more I did it―the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high.
It was something. Don't say it wasn't.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“She said I'd better not make her unhappy because I oughta know that she's never unhappy alone.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“Sometimes you stand under the hot gush for so long, looking at your body, counting every bruise. Touching every tender place. Watching the swirl at your feet, the glitter spinning. Like a mermaid shedding her scales.
You’re really just trying to get your heart to slow “down.
You think, This is my body, and I can make it do things. I can make it spin, flip, fly.
After, you stand in front of the steaming mirror, the fuchsia streaks gone, the lashes unsparkled. And it’s just you there, and you look like no one you’ve ever seen before. You don’t look like anybody at all.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“we're all wanting things we don't understand. things we can't even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions over our hearts.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“I think she might cry. In her way, she is.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“She was the one who showed me all the dark wonders of life, the real life, the life I’d only seen flickering from the corner of my eye. Did I ever feel anything at all until she showed me what feeling meant? Pushing at the corners of her cramped world with curled fists, she showed me what it meant to live.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“The drone in my ear, it’s like the tornado drill in elementary school, the hand-cranked siren that rang mercilessly, all of us hunched over on ourselves, facing the basement walls, heads tucked into our chests. Beth and me wedged tight, jeaned legs pressed against each other. The sounds of our own breathing. Before we all stopped believing a tornado, or anything, could touch us, ever”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control all of it.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“Can I trust you, Addy?” he asks. I say he can. Does anyone ever answer that question with a no?”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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

“Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“We’re all the same under our skin, aren’t we? We’re all wanting things we don’t understand. Things we can’t even name. The yearning so deep, like pinions over our hearts.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“She looks down at me, her eyes depthful and ruinous.
"Love is a kind of killing, Addy,' she says. 'Don’t you know that?”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“This is my body, and I can make it do things. I can make it spin, flip, fly.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“Bobby pins crunching under my feet, I walk through, surveying the damaged girlness.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“I know what that’s like,” he says. “The way you can be saved without ever knowing you were in trouble.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“Suddenly,I want to hold the whole night close to my chest and I decide it is mine alone”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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?”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“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.”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me

“It is not aloofness, superiority. It’s a protection. Who in this ravaged battlefield doesn’t want to gather close her comrades?”
― Megan Abbott, Dare Me