The Collective Quotes

“Even for the luckiest of us, life is mostly pain, with moments of happiness thrown in just to keep us vertical.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in your heart. I’ll stay there forever.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“None of these monsters are evil. It’s the evil of others that makes them powerful. Beaten down by the world, shunned, robbed of what they love, they don’t curl up and die. They don’t apologize. They fight back. They get bigger, stronger, more terrifying. You are a monster. We all are. Be grateful for THAT.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“Knowledge breeds confidence.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“I raise my glass to karma—which, I’m
realizing, is sometimes a group effort.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“if I didn’t ask questions, the truth would still be the truth.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“Joan once told me she thought compartmentalizing gets a bad rap—especially when it comes to people like us, who have been through something so traumatic; ignoring it for long periods of time can be a means of survival. When you’ve been through fire, you can’t feel that burn every day, she explained. You have to go on with your life.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“There are moments in my life—just a few of them—when the present and the future seem to bleed into each other and I see everything from the strangest perspective, understanding before I even know what’s happening that from here on in, nothing will be the same.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“The good thing about living alone is, you can say things out loud without worrying about how crazy they sound.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“If it wasn’t him, it was someone just like him, because the world is full of young men just like him—unremarkable in every regard, except for the ridiculous privilege with which they were born.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“I am capable. I am capable. I am capable.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“my dream, as taught to me by my own mother, was to be the final destination of a man’s journey.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“I’d never watched The Bachelor myself and was basing everything on preconceptions. But somehow the idea of all these intelligent young women competing pageant-style for the love of some blandly handsome pharmaceutical sales rep who kept talking about his “journey.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“I read the cheery caption, about how award-recipient Harris Blanchard “took a gap year, but is certainly making up for it!” So that’s what they are calling it now—the time before and after he stood trial for the rape of my daughter. A gap year.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“They need to be punished to feel guilt, and then they’re never punished, so they never do.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“the world is full of young men just like him—unremarkable in every regard, except for the ridiculous privilege with which they were born.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“The hope that grief counselors and clergy try to make you feel. The phrases well-meaning friends throw at you. She’s out there, watching over you, gazing down at you. She’s with you, every day, living again in every memory. . . . It’s all a bunch of crap.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“It’s the price you pay for being dumb enough to feel secure in your life.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“I need the job. I need to spend a certain amount of my day focused on things like fonts and resolutions and links, or else my mind will go to that dark, cold place it goes whenever it has nothing else to do. I’ll relive that night five years ago, relive it over and over again but with different outcomes. Impossible outcomes. I’ll break things. I’ll drink. I’ll hurt people who don’t deserve to be hurt, when the one person who does deserve it continues to thrive. To sparkle. To win awards. I need this job to survive.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“Those comic book conventions where they dress up as characters and fully commit to the roles, the online games where they waste entire days in a cartoon landscape, spending play money and living out alternate identities, even falling in love . . . You have to have one foot in childhood to commit to pretending that intensely, and they do. These kids do. Anyway,”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“boredom dulls your ability to make the right decisions. Boredom creeps up on you slowly, wraps its tendrils around you and tugs at you in such a subtle yet constant way, you’ll do anything to escape it. You’ll behave recklessly and stupidly.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“Boredom creeps up on you slowly..wraps its tendrils around and tugs you until you'll do anything to escape it.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“Mount Shady is a lovely town, but it’s also homogenous and boring, and boredom dulls your ability to make the right decisions. Boredom creeps up on you slowly, wraps its tendrils around you and tugs at you in such a subtle yet constant way, you’ll do anything to escape it. You’ll behave recklessly and stupidly. You’ll trust the wrong people, with disastrous results. Emily would still be alive if we’d stayed in New York.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“Oh, and I’m dependent on antianxiety meds, the only therapist I ever had died from a fall down a flight of stairs, and there’s a viral video of me losing my mind at a public event, taken just before my own arrest. I’m not what anyone would call a reliable witness.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“If you’re a karma person, then Ed and Natalie deserved nothing but sunshine and rainbows for the next hundred years. But all they got was enough happiness to know how awful it is to lose it.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“There’s a weight to having a destination and a purpose, even if that purpose is saying hi to a stranger as he’s leaving a cemetery. It tethers me, the way being a mother used to. It makes me feel as though I’m part of something more important than myself.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“your family gives enough money to a school, that school will defend you to the death, no matter what the facts are behind that death. They’re like cults you pay to be the leader of. And Brayburn, as I learned from Xenia, of all people, has been serving its devotees an especially potent strain of Kool-Aid.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“As though, after five years, a light’s been switched on, and how Camille Gardener feels is the only thing that matters”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“0001 knew what would happen. If everything went the way she planned it to go and if each part of this giant machine she’s assembled performed her role effectively, she knew very well where the knife would wind up, but how did she know Harris Blanchard would be there?”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective

“Harris Blanchard was a terrible human being. But he was also a kid like Emily was, with a mother and a father. And his death hasn’t changed my life for the better. It hasn’t made Emily any more alive.”
― Alison Gaylin, The Collective