Emma Cline Quotes & Sayings

Mitch studied me with a questioning, smug smile. Men did it so easily, that immediate parceling of value. And how they seemed to want you to collude on your own judgement. — Emma Cline

At that age, I was, first and foremost, a thing to be judged, and that shifted the power in every interaction onto the other person. The — Emma Cline

To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of — Emma Cline

We had been with the men, we had let them do what they wanted. But they would never know the parts of ourselves that we hid from them - they would never sense the lack or even know there was something more they should be looking for. Suzanne — Emma Cline

The filmmaker wanted me to know what I already knew: I had no power. He saw my need and used it against me. My hatred for him was immediate. Like the first swallow of milk that's already gone off - rot strafing the nostrils, flooding the entire skull. The filmmaker laughed at me, and so did the others, the older man who would later place my hand on his dick while he drove me home. None of this was rare. Things like this happened hundreds of times. Maybe more. The hatred that vibrated beneath the surface of my girl's face - I think Suzanne recognized it. — Emma Cline

These long-haired girls seemed to glide above all that was happening around them, tragic and separate. Like royalty in exile. I — Emma Cline

At that age I looked at women with brutal and emotionless judgement. Assessing the slope of their breasts, imagining how they would look in very crude positions. — Emma Cline

It took sustained, constant living to ward off decay. — Emma Cline

She was flanked by a skinny redhead and an older girl, dressed with the same shabby afterthought. As if dredged from a lake. — Emma Cline

Who had ever held Suzanne in their arms and told her that her heart, beating away in her chest, was there on purpose? — Emma Cline

But it was something else, too, that I wanted to extend: the taut and pleasant silence in the car, the stale heat raising vapours of leather. The warped image of myself in the side mirrors, so I caught only the quantity of hair, the freckled skin of my shoulder. I took on the shape of a girl. — Emma Cline

She had already absented herself, I knew, gone to that other place in her mind where Julian was sweet and kind and life was fun, or if it wasn't fun, it was interesting, and wasn't that valuable, didn't that mean something? — Emma Cline

As if there were only one way things could go, the years leading you down a corridor to the room where your inevitable self waited - embryonic, ready to be revealed. How sad it was to realize that sometimes you never got there. That sometimes you lived a whole life skittering across the surface as the years passed, unblessed. Julian — Emma Cline

My glitchy adolescent brain was desperate for causalities, for conspiracies that drenched every word, every gesture, with meaning. — Emma Cline

This is what it might be like to be a mother, I though, watching Sasha drain her beer, wipe her mouth like a boy. To feel this unexpected, boundless tenderness for someone, seemingly out of nowhere. — Emma Cline

Neither of us could fully participate in our days, though later Suzanne would participate in a way she could never take back. I mean that we didn't quite believe it was enough, what we were offered, and Tamar seemed to accept the world happily, as an end point. Her planning wasn't actually about making anything different - she was just rearranging the same known quantities, puzzling out a new order like life was an extended seating chart. — Emma Cline

I was almost a wife but lost the man. I was almost recognisable as a friend. And then I wasn't. The nights when I flicked off the bedside lamp and found myself in the heedless, lonely dark. The times I thought, with a horrified twist, that none of this was a gift. Suzanne got the redemption that followed a conviction ... I got the snuffed-out story of the bystander, a fugitive without a crime, half hoping and half terrified that no one was ever coming for me. — Emma Cline

The man was bearing down on me. My hands were limp and wet. Please, I thought. Please. Who was I addressing? The man? God? Whoever handled these things. — Emma Cline

He had a weary air of responsibility about him, both bureaucratic and mythological, like someone doomed to guard a cave for all eternity. I — Emma Cline

We were jealous, imagining a boyfriend who wanted you so bad he broke the law. — Emma Cline

I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board. — Emma Cline

The fumes of cruciferous vegetables, roiling in plastic bags. Nothing — Emma Cline

Hatred was easy. The permutations constant over the years: A stranger at a fair who palmed my crotch through my shorts. A man on the sidewalk who lunged at me, then laughed when I flinched. The night an older man took me to a fancy restaurant when I wasn't even old enough to like oysters. Not yet twenty. The owner joined our table, and so did a famous filmmaker. The men fell into a heated discussion with no entry point for me: I fidgeted with my heavy cloth napkin, drank water. Staring at the wall.

"Eat your vegetables," the filmmaker suddenly snapped at me. "You're a growing girl."

The filmmaker wanted me to know what I already knew: I had no power. He saw my need and used it against me. — Emma Cline

just the suffocating constancy of my own self, that numb and desperate company. - — Emma Cline

I could drink until my problems seemed compact and pretty, something I could admire. — Emma Cline

I would always be like this, I thought, the person who closed the refrigerator. — Emma Cline

if by putting distance between us, I could cure myself of the same disease. — Emma Cline

Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. — Emma Cline

. . . even the surprise of harmless others in the house disturbed me. I didn't want my inner rot on display, even accidentally. Living alone was frightening in that way. No one to police the spill of yourself, the ways you betrayed your primitive desires. Like a cocoon built around you, made of your own naked proclivities and never tidied into the patterns of actual human life. — Emma Cline

There are ways I made sense of my mother later. How fifteen years with my father had left great blanks in her life that she was learning to fill, like those stroke victims relearning the words for car and table and pencil. The shy way she looked for herself in the oracle of the mirror, as critical and hopeful as an adolescent. Sucking in her stomach to zip her new jeans. — Emma Cline

I was already starting to understand that other people's admiration asked something of you. That you had to shape yourself around it. — Emma Cline

Sometimes it seemed like I never really left ...That a version of me is always there. — Emma Cline

I took her beauty personally. — Emma Cline

We licked batteries to feel a metallic jolt on the tongue, rumored to be one-eighteenth of an orgasm. — Emma Cline

She searched until there was only searching left. — Emma Cline

When I was that age, I was uncertain of how to move, whether I was walking too fast, whether others could see the discomfort and stiffness in me. As if everyone were constantly gauging my performance and finding it lacking. — Emma Cline

Adults always teased me about having boyfriends, but there was an age where it was no longer a joke, the idea that boys might actually want you. — Emma Cline

So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes. — Emma Cline

I may have smiled to myself as I watched the familiar pattern of the town pass, the bus cruising through shade to sunshine. I'd grown up in this place, had the knowledge of it so deep in me that I didn't even know most street names, navigating instead by landmarks, visual or memorial. The corner where my mother had twisted her ankle in a mauve pantsuit. The copse of trees that always looked vaguely attended by evil. The drugstore with its torn awning. Through the window of that unfamiliar bus, the burr of old carpet under my legs, my hometown seemed scrubbed clean of my presence. It was easy to leave it behind. — Emma Cline

The queer reminder in her smile. Like we had a meeting, she and I, at some appointed time and place, and she knew I would forget. — Emma Cline

Her face as pale and blameless as a lesser moon. - — Emma Cline

the liquor aiding the shorthand of my loneliness. It was strange that I could feel differently so easily, that there was a sure way to soften the crud of my own sadness. — Emma Cline

So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how badly people wanted it - to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been still existed inside of them. There — Emma Cline

The ways your desire could humiliate you. — Emma Cline

I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. — Emma Cline

I waited to be told what was good about me. [...] All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you- the boys had spent that time becoming themselves. — Emma Cline

And now I was older, and the wishful props of future selves had lost their comforts. I might always feel some form of this, a depression that did not lift but grew compact and familiar, a space occupied like the sad limbo of hotel rooms. — Emma Cline

He'd looked at us like we were butterflies he was pinning to a board. — Emma Cline

Asshole," she muttered, but she wasn't really mad. That was part of being a girl - you were resigned to whatever feedback you'd get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn't react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they'd backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you. I — Emma Cline

She must have already forgiven him for leaving her behind. Girls were good at coloring in those disappointing blank spots. I thought of the night before, her exaggerated moans. Poor Sasha. She — Emma Cline

Someone's boyfriend died in a rock-climbing accident in Switzerland: everyone gathered around her, on fire with tragedy. Their dramatic shows up support underpinned with jealousy- bad luck was rare enough to be glamorous. — Emma Cline

to eat meat was to eat fear — Emma Cline

They didn't have very far to fall--I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board. My childhood visits to the family doctor were stressful events for that reason. He'd ask me gentle questions: How was I feeling? How would I describe the pain? Was it more sharp or more spread out? I'd just look at him with desperation. I needed to be told, that was the whole point of going to the doctor. To take a test, be put through a machine that would comb my insides with radiated precision and tell me what the truth was. — Emma Cline

But I could not fully admit it, even then. The way Suzanne's face looked as she watched him - I wanted to be with her. I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they'd understand the scale and intensity of your feelings and act accordingly. — Emma Cline

Break down the self, offer yourself up like dust to the universe. — Emma Cline

You wanted things and you couldn't help it, because there was only your life, only yourself to wake up with, and how could you ever tell yourself what you wanted was wrong? — Emma Cline

Everyone, later, would find it unbelievable that anyone involved in the ranch would stay in that situation. A situation so obviously bad. But Suzanne had nothing else: she had given her life completely over to Russell, and by then it was like a thing he could hold in his hands, turning it over and over, testing its weight. Suzanne and the other girls had stopped being able to make certain judgments, the unused muscle of their ego growing slack and useless. It had been so long since any of them had occupied a world where right and wrong existed in any real way. Whatever instincts they'd ever had - the weak twinge in the gut, a gnaw of concern - had become inaudible. — Emma Cline

Why couldn't relationships be reciprocal, both people steadily accruing interest at the same rate? — Emma Cline

Money is ego, and people won't give it up. Just want to protect themselves, hold on to it like a blanket. They don't realize it keeps them slaves. It's sick" "What's funny is that as soon as you give everything away, as soon as you say, Here, take it - that's when you really have everything". — Emma Cline

That's how badly people wanted it - to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been still existed inside of them. — Emma Cline

Without having to think about it, I knew Julian and Zav were sitting in the front seats and Sasha was in the back. I could imagine her leaning forward from time to time, asking for a joke to be repeated or pointing out some funny road sign. Trying to campaign for her own existence, before finally giving up and lying back on the seat. Letting their conversation thicken into meaningless noise while she watched the road, the passing orchards. The branches flashing with the silver ties that kept away birds. - — Emma Cline

Maybe this was a better way, even though it seemed alien. To be part of this amorphous group, believing love could come from any direction. So you wouldn't be disappointed if not enough came from the direction you'd hoped. - — Emma Cline

A rock, I thought crazily. He'll pick up a rock. He'll break open my skull, my brain leaking onto the sand. He'll tighten his hands around my throat until my wind-pipe collapses.
The stupid things I thought of:
Sasha and her briny, childish mouth. How the un had looked in the tops of the trees lining my childhood driveway. Whether Suzanne knew I thought of her. How the mother must have begged, at the end. — Emma Cline

I'd seen old Yardley Slickers- the makeup now just a waxy crumble- sell for almost one hundred dollars on the internet. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That's how badly people wanted it- to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been, still existed inside of them.

There were so many things that returned me. The tang of soy, the smoke in someone's hair, the grassy hills turning blond in June. An arrangement of oaks and boulders could, seen out of the corner of my eye, crack open something in my chest, palms going suddenly slick with adrenaline. — Emma Cline

I'd always liked her in a way I never had to think about, like the fact of my own hands. — Emma Cline

The moment the frightened people understand the sweet dailiness of their lives - the swallow of morning orange juice, the tilting curve taken on a bicycle - is already gone. — Emma Cline

There are survivors of disasters whose accounts never begin with the tornado warning or the captain announcing engine failure, but always much earlier in the timeline: an insistence that they noticed a strange quality to the sunlight that morning or excessive static in their sheets. A meaningless fight with a boyfriend. As if the presentiment of catastrophe wove itself into everything that came before. — Emma Cline

Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of live. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like 'sunset' and 'Paris.' Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus — Emma Cline

but I was past the point of caring, the night stoking a foolish, confused sense that I had somehow returned to the world after a period of absence, had taken up residence again in the realm of the living. — Emma Cline

For a moment, I tried to see myself through the eyes of the girl with the black hair, or even the boy in the cowboy hat, studying my features for a vibration under the skin. The effort was visible in my face, and I felt ashamed. No wonder the boy had seemed disgusted: He must have seen the longing in me. Seen how my face was blatant with need, like an orphan's empty dish. And that was the difference between me and the black-haired girl- her face answered all it's own questions. — Emma Cline

...I was confusing familiarity with happiness. Because that was there even when love wasn't... — Emma Cline

We all want to be seen. - — Emma Cline

It pained me to imagine how our twosome appeared to others, marked as the kind of girls who belonged to each other. — Emma Cline

How impotent my anger was, a surge with no place to land, and how familiar that was: my feelings strangled inside me, like little half-formed children, bitter and bristling. — Emma Cline

That was part of being a girl--you were resigned to whatever feedback you'd get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn't react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they'd backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you. — Emma Cline

Julian smiled what I thought of as the smile of an only son, someone who believed he would always get what he wanted. — Emma Cline

Twisting the nipple so I inhaled audibly, and he hesitated for a moment but kept going. His dick smearing at my bare thighs. I would be shunted along whatever would happen, I understood. However he piloted the night. And there wasn't fear, just a feeling adjacent to excitement, a viewing from the wings. What would happen to Evie? — Emma Cline

Girls were good at coloring in those disappointing blank spots. — Emma Cline

Only after the trial did things come into focus, that night taking on the now familiar arc. Every detail and blip made public. There are times I try to guess what part I might have played. What amount would belong to me. It's easiest to think I wouldn't have done anything, like I would have stopped them, my presence the mooring that kept Suzanne in the human realm. That was the wish, the cogent parable. But there was another possibility that slouched along, insistent and unseen. The bogeyman under the bed, the snake at the bottom of the stairs: maybe I would have done something, too. Maybe it would have been easy. — Emma Cline

The things I was good at had no real application: addressing envelopes in bubble letters with smiling creatures on the flap. Making sludgy coffee I drank with grave affect. Finding a certain desired song playing on the radio, like a medium scanning for news of the dead. — Emma Cline

My eyes were already habituated to the texture of decay, so I thought that I had passed back into the circle of light. — Emma Cline

There wasn't that much difference. Between me and the other girls. — Emma Cline

The silences between us would've been better if they were colored with sadness or regret, but it was worse - I could hear how happy he was to be gone. — Emma Cline

Let's just give her a ride into town," Suzanne said.
She spoke briskly, like I was a mess that needed to be cleaned up. Even so, I was glad. I was used to thinking about people who never thought about me. — Emma Cline

I took on the shape of a girl. — Emma Cline

Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved. They noticed what we want noticed. — Emma Cline

... a fugitive without a crime... — Emma Cline

A lot of young people ran away: you could do it back then just because you were bored. You didn't even need a tragedy. — Emma Cline

How drugs patchworked simple, banal thoughts into phrases that seemed filled with importance. My glitchy adolescent brain was desperate for causalities, for conspiracies that drenched every word, every gesture, with meaning. I wanted Russell to be a genius. — Emma Cline

There are always places to go, — Emma Cline

They suggested E-meters, Gestalt, eating only high-mineral foods that had been planted during a full moon. — Emma Cline

It was an age when I'd immediately scan and rank other girls, keeping up a constant tally of how I fell short. — Emma Cline

It was a time when I imagined getting married in a simple, wishful way. The time when someone promised to take care of you, promised they would notice if you were sad, or tired, or hated food that tasted like the chill of the refrigerator. Who promised their lives would run parallel to yours. My mother must have known and stayed anyway, and what did that mean about love? It was never going to be safe - all the mournful refrains of songs that despaired you didn't love me the way I loved you. — Emma Cline

Pamela was beautiful, it was true, and I felt that submerged attraction to her that everyone felt for the beautiful. — Emma Cline

I believed, in the way of adolescents, in the absolute correctness and superiority of my love. — Emma Cline

Illuminati communicated with one another. "Why would a secret — Emma Cline

I envied Victor's certainty, the idiot syntax of the righteous. This belief - that the world had a visible order, and all we had to do was look for the symbols - as if evil were a code that could be cracked. — Emma Cline

her face answered all its own questions. I — Emma Cline

the sweet drone of honeysuckle thickening the — Emma Cline

But Suzanne got the worst of it. Depraved. Evil. Her sneaky beauty didn't photograph well. She looked feral and meager, like she might have existed only to kill. Talking — Emma Cline