Give Me Your Hand Quotes

“The fear all men have that there’s something inside us that shifts, and turns. A living thing, once dormant, stirring now, and filled with rage.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“It felt like you could hurt her just by looking at her, or you could never hurt her at all.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“But the truth is, you can rarely undo things. This is what you realize after one of your parents dies.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“A professor once described the brain to me as a great silent vault. A dark theater with nothing playing on the screen. Just electrical charges bouncing corner to corner, like lightbulbs flashing off and on. Science doesn’t yet have any idea how everyone’s private, personal experience of the world springs from that empty vault. We don’t know yet why we sleep or why we dream. What and how we remember. The world is a fiction the brain constructs. The smell of a fresh peach, the punch of a firefly in the night sky. The lilting hush-hush of a first lullaby. The brain fashions it all and we don’t know how, or why.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“When you get away with something it’s yours only, forever. Heavy and irremediable.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“(When your mom is gone, the thing no one ever tells you is that the little compass needle inside keeps spinning around and around, never finding north.)”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“By telling me, you trapped me," I say through my teeth. "By telling you," she whispers, rain still glistening on her, "I was free.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“But maybe I cared too, because sometimes I found myself wondering about those things. I just didn't show it. It was high school; you didn't show things.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“are women so much more ferocious in their violence?”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“she told me her secret. And showed me what darkness was, and is, and how it works, and how it never goes away or ends.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“Something was consuming the girl. I need help. She thought of her in that interview room, slightly breathless and entrancing. Wanting desperately to be told that nothing was her fault, that her body and brain had conspired against her. The feeling she must have, always, of being in between worlds, the worlds separated only by an impenetrable pane of glass.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“In some animal part of my brain, I guess I thought looking her up might somehow summon her. So I never did. And she came anyway.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“Because the bad things you do become part of you, literally. This is no metaphor. They become part of you on a cellular level, in the blood.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“My mom always says, you don’t have a self until you have a secret.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“My head is so full of plans that it seems aflame.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“never replied to forevers. Life was long, and full of surprises.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“The men's gazes are heavy on us. Heavy and pointed, three dull sabers to our chests. They would be high-fiving if it were them. Crowing and banging tabletops. We don't move or even smile.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“you will have to fight your entire life. And that’s why you’ll always be better. Because you wanted it so much more.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“Beautiful, he says, and she could titrate like a motherfucker.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“Women have to live so much of their life in the in-betweens.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“The world is blood-hot and personal. —Sylvia Plath”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“Women have always been far less violent than men, the author conceded. The facts speak for themselves.
But why, then, he asked, are women so much more ferocious in their violence?
It has always seemed to me that the answer lies in the question.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“Because---and this was the first time I understood this--- everyone always like the best, wants the most, admires deeply, the girl who's just out of reach. The girl no one can touch, really. We don't know why we're drawn, but it's unstoppable.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“The memories come in pieces. Little bits of grit too small to pick up even with a wetted finer, too small even to hold in my gaze.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“The world is a fiction the brain constructs”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“That’s your shadow, my mom told me once. You need it more than you think.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“Give me your hand,” she says, offering hers. “Hurry now.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“The way men touch you is so different from how boys do. Like they know all the handles and levers. Which felt so unfair, really.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“It's just nature," I point out, wiping my lab bench, the sweet smell of the ethanol solvent. "Put animals in a small, closed space, and the one with the sharpest nails, the pointiest teeth wins."
He gins. "Or maybe it's just like musical chairs?"
It's a luxury to view it so lightly. But I nod. It's best never to let them see your teeth.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand

“It's that powerful, this thing we share. A murky history, its narrative near impenetrable. We keep telling it to ourselves, noting its twists and turns, trying to make sense of it. And hiding it from everyone else.”
― Megan Abbott, Give Me Your Hand