Die a Little Quotes

“It is simple as this: she has a complicated life and her clothes can't help but show it. It is all part of her unique disheveled glamour.”
― Megan Abbott, Die a Little

“That night in my apartment, and other nights, too, burrowed under the covers, I watch the shadows on the wall and think of meeting men, meeting men like in movies, and meeting men like Alice and her mysterious friends seem to - seem to at least in Alice’s stories - men met on buses between stops, in the frozen foods aisle, at Woolworth’s when buying a spool of thread, at the newsstand, perusing Look, in hotel lobbies, at supper clubs, while hailing cabs or looking in shop windows. Men with smooth felt hats and pencil mustaches, men with Arrow shirts and shiny hair, men eager to rush ahead for the doors and to steady your arm as you step over a wet patch on the road, men with umbrellas just when you need them, men who hold you up with a firm grip as the bus lurches before you can reach a seat, men with flickering eyes who seem to know just which coat you are trying to reach off the rack in the coffee shop, men with smooth cheeks smelling of tangy lime aftershave who would order you a gin and soda before you even knew you wanted one.”
― Megan Abbott, Die a Little

“She wasn't just a B-girl, she was carrying the whole ugly world in her eyes.”
― Megan Abbott, Die a Little

“They watch her when she comes to City Hall, they watch her at the social events, they watch the way she walks, hips rolling with no suggestion of provocation but with every sense that she knows more than any of the rest. A woman like that, they seem to be thinking, a woman like that has lived.
Their wives from Orange County, they come from Minnesota or Dallas or St.Louis. They come from places with families, with sagging mothers and fathers with dead eyes and heavy-hanging brows. They carry their own promise of future slackness and clipped lips and demands. They have sisters, sisther with more babies, babies with sweet saliva hanging and more appliance and with husbands with better salaries and two cars and club membership. They iron in housedresses in front of the television set or by the radio, steam rising, matting their faces, as the children with the damp necks cling on them, sticky-handed. They are this. And Alice… and Alice…”
― Megan Abbott, Die a Little

“Here he is, the man who knows things and who should want to help me. But it is so hard to bring up things with any weight at all to a man like this. A man like this doesn’t have real conversations.”
― Megan Abbott, Die a Little

“Its not that they want her. It’s just they have this feeling, and they’re off, Billy, they’re way off, but they have this sense that, somehow behind that knockout face of hers, she’s more like the women they see on the job, on patrol, on a case, in the precint house. Women with stories as long as their rap sheets, as their dangling legs…”
― Megan Abbott, Die a Little

“The hardest thing in this world is finding out what you're capable of.”
― Megan Abbott, Die a Little