Necessary People Quotes

“It wasn’t that my personality changed when I met Stella. It was that it became, it flourished, because I could say things to Stella that I wouldn’t have said to anyone back home—knowing they would only respond with bafflement, or laughter—and she always volleyed right back, sharpening me like a whetstone to a knife. I didn’t just want the friendship of this dazzling girl. I wanted the world that had made her so dazzling in the first place.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Stella was the vine wrapped around the limbs of my tree, and even though I had branches that were dead and dangling and should have fallen off long ago, she kept them in place.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Lies require noise and misdirection to blend in, silence is the best way to draw the truth to the surface.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“There was the misery of having too little, but there was also the misery of living among those who believed there was no such thing as too much.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Listening to him complain about Stella was as satisfying as watching a rant-filled hour of cable news that confirmed all of your biases.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“I didn’t just want the friendship of this dazzling girl. I wanted the world that had made her so dazzling in the first place. This was a golden opportunity not to be taken for granted. So I paid attention. I studied everything. I learned the vocabulary and the syntax.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“You don’t want someone tripping over himself just because you look pretty that day. You want someone willing to alter the course of his career because of your talent.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“To be selfish. To be cruel, at times. To harden your heart so that you need no one else. When you realize how powerful this makes you, you keep it to yourself.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Food, water, warmth, shelter. These things are necessary to survive. It had taken me time to realize that people fit into this equation, too. Love fits into this equation, too. (...) There are people you cannot live without. To remember this is to remember your humanity.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“In that moment, playing God, I had finally decided that there was no more room for forgiveness, that this was the last of her nine lives.
The perverse thing was, she would have been proud of me. Finally standing up for yourself. I could imagine the bemusement in her voice. Didn’t think you had it in you. My mother, too. Violence was something she could respect. Letting Stella drown: I thought that it would cleave me from the past, distance me from the person I had been before. But sometimes I feared that it had only brought me closer to my dark, twisted roots.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Big changes like this always happened suddenly. But within days, people forgot that it had ever been different.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“He was commanding me to feel his pain, and to nurse him through it. And if this had been four years earlier, I might have. The fancy homes, the vacations, the life of luxury: once upon a time, that would have been sufficient compensation for this kind of emotional labor. But it wasn’t four years earlier. I knew better, by now.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“But there’s another kind [of ambition]. It’s the person who doesn’t show her cards. She’s willing to let other people think she’s there to help them. Her ambition isn’t so naked. It cloaks itself in teamwork and niceties. It’s the more dangerous kind. And I’m good at recognizing that, too.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“There was a term for those who never married, who were wedded to the job instead: a news nun. There’s a reason they don’t write fairy tales about brainy career women.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Guilt wasn’t as simple as you might believe. It wasn’t remorse or regret. It wasn’t a desire to go back in time and do things differently. It was walking around with knowledge that you alone possessed. Knowledge that takes up more space because there’s no one to share it with. In its specificity, in its intricacy, in its persistent details—the sloshing of the waves, the dark smear of blood, the coin-like moon—the truth weighed more than a hundred theories combined.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“The world is a place of brutal chaos, which is what makes it so easy for a crime to remain unsolved. If the criminal has done an adequate job of erasure, the world will supply infinite explanations to fill the vacuum”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“The things that Oliver liked about me now were the things that would eventually have to disappear, if we stayed together. That’s how it was done, in his world. He wanted to be the kind of man, he thought he was the kind of man, who was progressive and modern and supportive of his ambitious partner. But he also lived in a world of definite rules. After marriage, the women gave up their high-powered jobs. They hired caterers for the dinner parties they were expected to host. Society absorbed them.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“When you’re in a relationship, life becomes easier in ways that seem small at first, and gradually become significant. Take the Monday-morning-in-the-office dance. When a colleague asks about your weekend, and you’re single, it’s a scramble to come up with the right answers. You have to look busy, with friends and meals and interesting activities, like rooftop yoga and wine tastings. It isn’t acceptable to do nothing multiple weekends in a row, unless there’s a hurricane or a blizzard. If you’re ambitious in New York, ambition doesn’t end when the week does.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“In all my years, I had failed to understand how tenuous their self-assurance was. A life that appeared solid in construction, laid with bricks of wealth and good manners and good genes, was as flimsy as a house of cards.
The Bradleys, it turned out, were just as screwed up as anyone else.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“I was glad to be free of the cruel and sadistic person Stella had become, the way she warped the energy at work and at home, but I hadn’t accounted for the subtler ways her presence filled the edges of my life. It was calmer and easier without her. It was also lonelier.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“I could endure envy. It was the in-between that drove me crazy: pretending to love her, pretending to be happy for her, when the whole thing was a slow torture.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“The demands were obvious to us—we knew exactly what people liked to watch, and what they didn’t. The ratings bore that out, every single week. The audience liked clean takeaways. They liked black-and-white, heroes and villains. They liked the truth, but only kind of; they liked the truth packaged in a way to make them feel better about their own lives. Too much murkiness, and they are reminded of their own murk: their own mistakes, their own shortcomings, the times they, too, misbehaved and mistreated others. Those stories didn’t rate well. If you wanted people to watch, if you wanted to win the demo and get the blockbuster numbers that your bosses demanded, you needed a story with a good ending.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Here, as long as you followed the rules, you were okay. As long as the conversation was polite, it didn’t matter what was being said. Of course, this led to a lot of boring conversation, a lot of dull iterations of the name game. You know how old houses always look good? Whether mansion or tenement or saltbox, if it was built more than a century ago, it has a certain air of elegance. But when you think about the small rooms, the outdated layouts, the bad electrical wiring, you realize you’d never actually want to live there.
That was like the world of the rich. From far away, it looks enchanting. Up close, you realize the elegance is just a product of stasis. It’s easy to be tricked into thinking something is beautiful.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Real trust, Jamie said, can’t be transactional. And what is ambition if not a constant transaction? Hard work—days, weeks, months—in exchange for more money, more power, more influence. I wanted to succeed, and that was my problem: people could see that desire. They could smell it. How can you trust someone who reeks of ambition?”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“There were times I’d come close to believing it. If I played by the rules, if I did the right thing, if I put my trust in the mechanism of meritocracy and if I worked hard enough, I could do anything. This was America, after all.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“You couldn’t beat Stella Bradley at her own game. So I had found a separate game, one where we wouldn’t compete with each other.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Stella could look at my life—the long hours, the grunt work—and actually feel something like envy. But that was my own stupidity. Everyone wants what they don’t have. Everyone wants more.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Especially in New York, especially in this business, getting ahead was the cost of entry. Working was a way of being. Time not spent in pursuit of a larger ambition was time wasted. When asked whether I liked my job at KCN, I always said yes, but I thought, Why are you asking that question? Why is liking the metric? The job was both more than that and less than that. It wasn’t a source of peace and contentment, that was for sure. But it was my means of survival. It paid for rent and food and clothing. It propelled me further and further from the life I’d known before.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“I wanted to succeed, to prove that I could do this. I wanted that more badly than I’d ever wanted anything. The world is shaped by powerful forces—politics, finance, media—from which most people live distantly, feeling the ripple effects but never understanding the origin. In the past year, I had finally crossed a crucial threshold. I was standing on the side of actor, not acted-upon. I sensed myself getting stronger, sharper, better. But I also sensed how desire fed on itself. It ballooned inside of me, until it squeezed out room for anything else. Sometimes I wondered whether it was deforming me.
But maybe that was backwards. Maybe you had to be deformed in the first place to be capable of such blistering want. Things weren’t getting pushed out. It was that there’d never been anything else in there. Just a void, waiting to be filled.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“Sometimes it frightened me, how perceptive she was. She knew precisely where a person’s vulnerabilities lay hidden. She knew exactly where to angle her knife, for maximum pain. Maybe I loved Stella because she was the opposite of everything I’d grown up with. Or maybe I loved her because she was, at some level, just like my parents.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People

“I thought my evasions were clever. I thought, on some level, that Stella wasn’t really listening.
But she was always listening, even when it didn’t appear that way. Tucking away that knowledge for future use.”
― Anna Pitoniak, Necessary People